Forecasting Global Climatic Change Impacts on Mediterranean Agricultural Land Use in the Twenty First Century

This chapter is based on three years of research that started in 1996 and was undertaken as part of a European Union (EU) funded project concerned with Mediterranean desertification and land use. This project, known as MEDALUS III, consisted of a wide range of topics aiming to describe, analyse and model various aspects of climatic and environmental change at different spatial scales in the Mediterranean (MEDALUS III Final Report, 1999). One key objective of this work was to integrate socio-economics into physical models of agricultural land degradation. This task could have been tackled in various ways but the approach we adopted involved developing a prototype Synoptic Prediction System (SPS) to model relationships between climatic, physical and socio-economic variables in order to translate potential climate change scenarios into estimates of land degradation risk.