Climate-dependent scenarios of land use for biodiversity and ecosystem services in the New Aquitaine region

The synergies and trade-offs between human well-being, biodiversity, and ecosystem services are under debate for the design of more sustainable public policies. In that perspective, there is a need of quantitative methods to compare all these outcomes under alternative policy scenarios. The present paper provides scenarios at the horizon 2053 for the New Aquitaine region in France. They rely on spatio-temporal models derived from individual land-use choices under climate change. The models are estimated at the national level from 1993 to 2003 fine-scale data. We focus on farming, forestry, and urban land uses along with bird biodiversity scores and a basket of ecosystem services, namely carbon sink, recreation, and water quality. A "climate-economic adaptation" scenario shows that climate-induced land use worsens the negative effects of climate change on biodiversity and several ecosystem services in the long run as compared to a "status quo" scenario. Another scenario with an incentive policy based on a payment for pastures slightly mitigates these impacts on biodiversity and water pollution. However, this turns out to be detrimental for other ecosystem services. This confirms that the design of sustainable policies cannot be limited to uniform strategies and should account for the complexity of ecosystem management.