Sustainability Impact Assessment of Land Use Changes

Land use is a key human activity, which, through the exploitation of natural resources, fosters socio-economic development and alters structures and processes in the environment. At the European level, the Sustainable Development Strategy stresses the need for real integration of economic, environmental and social issues across policy areas. In particular, land use policy aims to promote sustainability pathways of natural resources use and rural development through the decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation while supporting social cohesion. Manifested with the idea of multifunctional land use,the environment is understood to provide a portfolio of functionalities, which, through proper land use management, can be exploited as environmental goods and services for the benefit of society. A sustainable way of managing land use and exploiting environmental functionalities requires tools that can provide anticipations of possible impacts of land use decisions at all levels of governance.

Ex-ante Impact Assessment (IA) was officially introduced into European Commission (EC) policy making in 2002. It is understood as a formal procedure to analyse potential effects of new policies before their adoption. The two main drivers behind this EC initiative are the EU Sustainable Development Strategy and the Better Regulation agenda. IA is carried out on policy level by the Secretariat General of the EC.

In parallel, Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA) exist. They are based at EC Directorate of Environment. EIA analysis impacts of project on the environment and SEA is concerned with impacts of plans and programmes mainly on the environment.

The EU project SENSOR develops ex-ante Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT) to support decision making on European land use and environmental policies. The project relates directly to the efforts of the EC, on behalf of the European Union (EU), to integrate all single sector policy assessment into one impact assessment procedure.

This article outlines the historical background of impact assessment and it presents the three IA procedures simultaneously in use by the EC, their level and scope. It aims to provide the reader with a classification helping to identify the role of IA tools as developed in SENSOR for EC decision making.

This chapter reviews the potential application of Impact Assessment (IA) in the European Commission in relation to issues of land use. Drawing on qualitative research conducted with EC policy-makers, conclusions are drawn concerning the probable role and application of SENSOR’s Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool (SIAT) in the course of the EC Impact Assessment procedure.

A participatory approach is integral to the IA process, with national level stakeholders consulted throughout at EC level. In the current procedures, opportunities for consultation within the short time span of an IA tend only to reach lobby groups and activists, and citizens who are affected by the policy are unlikely to contribute directly as individuals to the debate. There are opportunities to engage local stakeholders as part of the operation of the tools themselves, but this is likely to be restricted to medium-term strategic development of the tools, as the time required may be outside the timescale normal for operational IA.

Although some IAs have been carried out to a short timescale and have consequently been brief and descriptive, there is evidence of an increasing importance being given to IAs during the policy-making process, and it is concluded that flexible tools are needed that can exist in different forms: 1. a superficial level which doesn’t require reprogramming and works for a wide range of policies and could be used immediately by trained desk officers. 2. an intermediate level which requires several weeks’ work to programme and run the tool for a particular policy area 3. a strategic level where the tool is being developed and programmed for one or more policy areas and used over successive years to contribute at particular points in the development of specific policies. This third level of complexity to include updating and reprogramming the source models might be necessary to deal with a completely new policy area, or one that has not yet been modelled adequately, and this would require a longer term expert study.

The paper aims at describing the environment, actors, practices and dynamics in the context of the European Commission’s Impact Assessment procedures into which a quantitative ex-ante policy assessment tool of land use changes has to be introduced. Both fields - Impact Assessment and land use modelling tools - are only now evolving. The institutions that guide the choice of modelling tools in the IA process are rather unclear. However, if results of the development of modelling tools are to be used, fit to their institutional environment can be enhanced by understanding this setting. This paper is based on problem-centred interviewing at different EC levels, which focussed on these issues. The purpose was to understand the context into which the Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool, which the SENSOR Consortium currently constructs, will be introduced in the European Commission. The paper concludes that the choices of desk officers are informed by their motivation to produce successful policy proposals. Modelling tools that are usable for the Commission’s Impact Assessment furthermore have to be plausible and transparent. They have to rely on official data. Often the use of modelling tools is scrutinised in a variety of fora. Land use issues and the like are of minor importance to the European Commission’s Impact Assessment as land use is not perceived to be a competence of the European Commission.

Land use includes those human activities that exhibit a spatial dimension and that change the bio-geophysical conditions of land. Land use policy making at European level aims at fostering sustainability pathways of natural resource use and rural development through the decoupling of economic growth from environmental degradation while supporting social cohesion in rural areas. Targeted policy making requires tools for the ex ante assessment of impacts of policy driven land use changes on sustainable development opportunities in European regions. These tools have to cover all relevant land use sectors and impact issues including their interrelations. They have to be spatially explicit, allow scenario analysis of possible future developments, be based on reproducible analyses, and be transparent and easy to use. The European Commission funded Integrated Project SENSOR is dedicated to develop such ex-ante Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT) for land use in European regions. SIAT is designed as a meta modelling toolkit, in which global economic trend and policy scenarios are translated into land use changes at 1km² grid resolution for the area of Europe. Based on qualitative and quantitative indicator analyses, impacts of simulated land use changes on social, environmental and economic sustainability issues are assessed at regional (NUTS2/3) scale. Valuation of these impacts is based on the concept of multifunctionality of land use. It is conducted through expert and stakeholder valuations leading to the determination of sustainability choice spaces for European regions. This paper presents the analytical approach in SENSOR and describes the impact assessment framework.

This paper focuses on the development process and performance of the integrated meta-model Sustainability Impact Assessment Tool (SIAT), whose appropriateness for Sustainability Impact Assessment is finally discussed.

The integrated meta-modelling approach SIAT is the central product of the project SENSOR, which innovates a simultaneous ex-ante policy impact assessment by 45 indicators with a full coverage of EU27. The knowledge-based model SIAT enables end users to assess the effects of land-use relevant EU-policy strategies and evaluate the impacts against sustainability criteria.

The concept of the development process is crucial for the success of SIAT, since problem- and user-orientation can only be ensured by meeting precisely user’s requirements. The adequate external involvements of institutions in the design process as well as project-internal knowledge integration are essential keys for success. Latter focuses on quantitative assessments, qualitative knowledge and ensuring a consistent multi-scale interconnectivity.

The novelty of the meta-model approach SIAT consists of the dual approach that a) analyses by ‘impact identification’ the effects of changes on multifunctional land use and subsequent b) assesses their fulfilment of sustainable tolerance limits through ‘sustainability (risk) valuation’. The model framework focuses on cross-sectoral trade offs and side effects of the six sectors agriculture, forestry, energy, transport, nature conversation and tourism. The regionalisation of results is rendered in administrative European regions (NUTS2/3).

The discussion concludes that the integrated meta-model SIAT is a feasible model concept to conduct sustainability impact assessments.

Modelling the impact of policies is possible only if these policies themselves are defined to some extent. Therefore, potential policies affecting multifunctional land use are grouped into policy cases around a number of central themes. However, a counterfactual is needed in order to know what the situation in the target year would be in the absence of policy change. Several approaches to designing scenarios for this counterfactual are discussed, and the chosen approach is elaborated into a description of baseline scenarios to be used in the project.

The purpose of the model component in SENSOR is to quantify the effects of a comprehensive set of policies on land use. The need to include interaction between sectors as well as a high level of detail for each sector calls for a combination of sector specific and sector wide models. This chapter describes the modelling system, with emphasis on the linking of the models to a coherent system. Five sectors of significant importance for land use are modelled individually: Forestry, agriculture, urban land use, transport infrastructure and tourism. All models are connected as sub-modules to an economy-wide partial econometric model. In addition, a land cover model is used to disaggregate land use down to 1 km grid resolution.

The linking of such a diverse set of models in a consistent way poses conceptual as well as practical issues. The conceptual issues concern questions such as which items of the models to link, how to obtain a stable joint baseline scenario, and how to obtain a joint equilibrium solution for all models simultaneously in simulation. Practical issues concern the actual implementation of the conceptually sound linkages and provision of a workable technical solution. In SENSOR, great care has been taken to develop a sound linkage concept.

The linked system allows the user to introduce a shock in either of the models, and the set of results will provide a joint solution for all sectors modelled in SENSOR. In this manner, the models take a complex policy scenario as argument and compute a comprehensive set of variables involving all five sectors on regional level, which in turn forms a basis for distilling out the impact on sustainability in the form of indicators. Without the extensive automation and technical linkages, it would not have been possible to obtain a joint equilibrium, or it would have required exorbitant amounts of working time.

In the tourism component of SENSOR, attraction modelling is needed to predict the likely distribution of growth in tourism facilities at the subnational level. Modelling of tourism flows between countries is obtained through a demand modelling linked to a bilateral flow matrix. This paper presents analysis of tourist beds at the NUTSX level in order to allow for a geographical disaggregation of tourism loads within the country. In summary, 79% of the variation in tourism bed densities and 39% of the variation in growth through the 1990s can be explained by physio-geographical predictors in combination with GDP/capita and population. Prominent predictors of tourist attraction are the relatively ‘fixed assets’ of alpine areas in the region and access to the coast, but several variables also link the attraction modelling to other model outcomes from the SENSOR project. Population density, GDP/capita, urban and nature land cover are generally positively related to tourism loads, while agriculture is negatively related to tourism. Thus, the regression models presented in the paper can be used to estimate the attractiveness of regions to tourists in a way that will be sensitive to the scenarios specified in the SENSOR project. Furthermore, the regression results suggest the magnitude of a saturation tendency, implying that crowding at some destinations will gradually redistribute tourist to other regions within the country.

Land use changes are a result of decision making at the local level which is influenced by changes in the regional and global economy, demography, policies and other factors operating over a wide range of organisational levels and spatial scales. This chapter describes a methodology to integrate the demands for changes in land use as determined by global and national scale processes with local level conditions influencing land use conversions across the European Union. The approach enables an assessment of landscape level changes in land use and the analysis of policies specifically aimed at land use and landscape functioning. A baseline scenario is presented to illustrate the approach and results.

Appropriate statistical profiles reveal differences in socio-economic contexts that need to be taken into account when assessing European policies. Since the SENSOR project aims at assessing the effects of regional differences in European developmental trends, and of policy scenarios on issues related to land use multifunctionality and linked sustainability, representative sets of European Regional Economic Profiles (REPs) were required. Furthermore, using landscape structure analysis, these profiles were integrated, together with land use management and biophysical parameters, into a Spatial Regional Reference Framework (SRRF) which revealed the main contrasts between European regions.

Socio-economic indicators, coming mainly from EUROSTAT, generally underline differences in economic development modes and in social conditions in Europe, at country or at regional level. In establishing REPs it was crucial to select indicators which could fulfil three general requirements: firstly, their presence in all European regions; secondly, their capacity for creating a significant set of regional profiles within the whole of Europe; and thirdly, their ability to reveal differences that can be interpreted in terms of pertinent issues. SENSOR benefited greatly from the experience of ESPON (European Spatial Planning Observation Network), but had to design a method for selecting a limited set of indicators which satisfied the last requirement. The main focus was placed on indicators which revealed human pressures on the land use functions under consideration in SENSOR - assuming that those socio-economic functions assigned to land uses are sensitive to the intensity of these pressures, which moreover may also affect environmental functions.

Finally, SENSOR REPs are composed of a few core socio-economic indicators introduced in the SRRF, which reveal the most relevant regional differences in economic potential, in human presence and in spatial settlement structures, supplemented by some sectorial indicators. They cannot reveal the whole complexity of socio-economic assets in European regions, however, they proved to be efficient in showing the variety of socioeconomic conditions within sets of regions which have similar landscape structures and which would thus be, to a lesser or greater degree, sensitive to changes which were further assessed in SENSOR.

A Spatial Regional Reference Framework (SRRF) has been produced which will allow an efficient assessment of sustainability impact indicators across Europe. In order to achieve this goal, it was necessary to define relatively homogeneous regions, in terms of both biophysical and socioeconomic characteristics. The major objective was the integration of these dimensions into European regions that were as uniform as possible. Therefore, in order to retain comparability, it was necessary to use consistent European databases. The spatial framework consisted of three levels, which were necessary to incorporate data on different tiers of spatial aggregation: (1) the INSPIRE Reference Grid, (2) a newly established NUTSx classification, which is a trade-off between administrative European NUTS2 and NUTS3 regions, and (3) the construction of SRRF cluster regions. The last were produced by using a statistical cluster analysis based on a restricted set of important biophysical and socio-economic parameters. 27 cluster regions resulted, which provided a flexible tool for further impact assessment at regional level.

SENSOR is dependent on sufficient reliable and accurate data that have to be provided and shared by the partners within the project. Access to reliable and harmonised data across Europe is a fundamental precondition for realisation of the SENSOR project. The current chapter describes basics concerning geo-spatial data types and formats, system architecture and database technologies, interoperability standards, including the INSPIRE principles, data warehouse and GeoPortal technologies. Further some information on spatial data mining, on data policies and related legal aspects and the SENSOR approach for spatial data handling are provided.

Indicators can represent important sources of information for different stages in the policy-making process. Indicator frameworks are ways to organize and systematize indicators for making them consistent, transparent and end-user oriented. The paper initially describes the role that indicator frameworks may have in achieving policy relevance for indicators, ensuring that indicators correspond to the values, policies and targets of policymakers. Next, the paper addresses different types of frameworks and exemplifies these with indicator frameworks that integrate environmental objectives into sectoral policies. The characteristics of frameworks for sustainability impact assessment and the development of an indicator framework for the SENSOR project are described. This includes concepts and models of sustainable development and indicators in Europe, and the criteria used for the construction of a SENSOR framework for indicator selection. The strengths and drawbacks of the framework are discussed.

Much progress has been made in understanding future trend development over the last years. Governments and international bodies are increasingly attempting to assess ex-ante the impact of their policy proposals. In the SENSOR project, environmental sustainability is assessed by answering a set of policy relevant questions likely to affect goods and services provided by land. The answer is complex and the assessment of future options is very sensitive to scale, how far ahead in time is being considered, and whether the assessment addresses local, regional or global concerns. The relationships between components of land use and the response of environmental indicators are not necessarily linear and assessing impacts at a European scale implies to use multi-scale sources of data of uneven quality across countries, which in turn creates constraints when interpreting the results at different spatial levels.

This chapter describes the methodology that was designed to undertake the environmental impact assessment in the SENSOR project. It presents the rationale behind the selection of indicators for environmental sustainability and addresses how environmental indicators can be derived from outputs of sectoral models, using two selected environmental indicators as an example. General issues connected to the modelling of environmental impact at pan-European level are discussed.

The context of sustainability as embodied in SENSOR, using the ‘triple bottom line’ concept, is briefly identified, and consequent frameworks and criteria for identifying indicators are discussed. These theoretical and practical criteria set significant constraints on the possible indicators to be used. The indicators are discussed in a summary form, and lessons are drawn. Reflections on the indicators and their use conclude the chapter.

In response to the need for developing methods for evaluating multidimensional problems in sustainability assessment, the scientific literature provides many examples related to the theory and use of composite indicators. In the context of the SENSOR project, dealing with the ex-ante assessment of environmental, social and economic impacts of European policies on multifunctional land use, new constraints and dimensions are added to the exercise. Examples are the need for consistency across European regions and across different scales of analysis; the use of qualitative and quantitative information; the possibility of aggregation to different administrative levels (sensitive areas, Member States, cluster regions, EU); and the correct balancing of the sustainability dimensions.

As a basis for the development of a system of composite indicators, this paper presents a critical review of existing methods for the weighting and thematic aggregation of indicators, and considers the characteristics of selected approaches in relation to the needs of impact assessment in general and the SENSOR requirements in particular.

The dramatic changes in land use observed in Europe in the last fifty years have generally resulted in improvement of human welfare and economic development. On the other hand, they have caused serious environmental problems. There is therefore a need for approaches that help to understand in an integrative way the economic, environmental and societal impacts that land use changes have on sustainability. Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA), which assesses the impact of policies on sustainability, addresses this challenge. SIA partly builds on the concept of the multifunctionality of land which helps to deal with the complexity of interactions between different land uses, their temporal and spatial changes, and finally how policies might steer those changes towards sustainability. Following this need for true integration of economic, environmental and societal issues across policy areas at a meaningful spatial scale, an interdisciplinary team in the SENSOR project has developed an innovative conceptual framework to assess the impact of policies on land sustainability at various levels of spatial aggregation i.e. the Land Use Functions (LUFs) framework. LUFs are the goods and services provided by the different land uses that summarise the most relevant economic, environmental and societal issues of a region. The LUFs framework integrates the changes observed in a large set of impact indicators into nine Land Use Functions (LUFs), which are balanced among the three pillars of sustainability. The LUFs framework makes it possible for policy makers, scientists and stakeholders to identify at a glance those functions of the land which are hindered or enhanced under various scenarios of land use change, and makes it possible to explore the trade-offs between them. The LUFs framework allows therefore the building of assessment across disciplines, sectors and the three sustainability dimensions. It has proved to be very helpful for the systematisation of relevant sustainability indicators within SENSOR and is intended to be further used in other projects as a tool for Sustainability Impact Assessment. The rationale leading to the LUFs concept, its definition and the conceptual framework is described in this chapter. We conclude that the concept of LUFs allows users to make explicit the analytical links between multifunctional land use and sustainable development, and therefore to look at multifunctionality as a way towards sustainability.

When identifying values for limits, a number of issues need to be considered. The consequences of exceedance of limits depend to a large extent on two related concepts, more or less relevant for both environmental and socio-economic sciences: path dependency and reversibility. Together, these help understand what the socio-economic and environmental consequences are, if they are reversible and the likely cost of achieving reversibility, or whether exceedance precludes any recovery. Exceedance of environmental limits often has a direct cost, revealed across many sectors, whereas the costs associated with exceedance of socio-economic limits may be harder to quantify. Together with a concept of risk, these concepts lead us to apply the precautionary principle, in other words to set conservative limits that define ‘unacceptable consequences’ some distance in advance of the point (or area) at which system break down or severe damage occurs. Crucially, these limits are derived through deliberative processes and involve both social acceptability and political input, together with scientific understanding of how the system operates (be it socio-economic or environmental).

Firstly, the paper explores the concepts of targets and limits from environmental and socio-economic perspectives and suggests some unifying terminology. Secondly, we examine some of the issues of uncertainty in considering values for limits or targets. These issues deal with the notion of equilibrium, the understanding of complex processes and the capacity of a system to adapt to an external event. Thirdly we underline how this uncertainty in the regional assessment challenges our ability to predict the consequences of exceeding the limits.

Sustainability impact assessments (SIA) are inherently difficult because they often require policy advisors to compare things that are not easily compared. For example, they generally require an evaluation of policy proposals or options across the ‘three pillars’ of economy, society and environment. In this chapter we explore how decisions are made in relation to questions about the sustainability of policies, and show how the consideration of sustainability limits can help integrate thinking across the economic, social and environmental domains. It is argued that in relation to questions about the sustainability of actions or policies, outcomes merely need to be sufficient to maintain human well-being and that the search for optimal strategies is probably misleading. The concept of a sustainability choice space is developed as a way of helping policy advisors visualise and explore what ‘room for manoeuvre’ they might have in the design of a specific policy. The sustainability choice space can be used to describe the degree to which alternative policy outcomes are acceptable to stakeholders across a range of criteria. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the role that the concept of a sustainability choice space might have as part of the sustainability impact assessment toolkit being developed through SENSOR, and how it can be extended by the involvement of stakeholders in the definition of sustainability limits and the kinds of trade-offs that need to considered in a multifunctional landscape.

This chapter describes the integration of stakeholder perspectives into the analysis of policy impacts within SENSOR. In particular, the chapter reports on a phase of ‘extensive’ research in selected ‘Sensitive Areas Case Studies’ (SACS), resulting in an overview of stakeholder perspectives on key sustainability issues. An understanding of these issues is presented as a critical reference point for subsequent research phases focusing on the impact assessment of land use policies. The discussion engages with one of the project’s central preoccupations, namely, that the production of thorough-going policy impact assessments which describe changes in social, economic and environmental systems across European regions is limited by current modelling capacity and data availability. In response, SENSOR proposes to extend the analytical scope of the automated tools through participatory research in selected ‘case study’ regions. The results of this research will be made available to the end user through the SIAT user interface. Results of the early, extensive phases of participatory research are presented and some implications for the ongoing design and analytical extension of the tools are discussed.

Cross-cutting environmental, social and economic changes may have harsh impacts on sensitive regions. To address sustainability issues by governmental policy measures properly, the geographical delineation of sensitive regions is essential. With reference to the European impact assessment guidelines from 2005, sensitive regions were identified by using environmental, social and economic data and by applying cluster analysis, United Nation Environmental Policy priorities and expert knowledge. On a regionalised ‘Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics’ (NUTS) level and for pre-defined sensitive region types (post-industrial zones, mountains, coasts and islands) 31 % of the European area was identified as sensitive. However, the delineation mainly referred to social and economic issues since the regional data bases on environmental indicators are limited and do not allow the separation of medium-term vital classes of sensitive regions. Overall, the sensitive regions showed indicator values differing from the EU- 25 average.