Scenarios of land-use change for Switzerland

Project abstract

In Switzerland, the decreasing significance of agriculture has led to prominent processes of land abandonment in mountainous areas where the maintenance of open land relies on human intervention. At the same time, urbanisation in Switzerland is increasing at a rapid rate at the expense of other land use types, particularly open land agriculture. In spite of these observed trends, the extent and location of anticipated land-use changes for the coming 20 years remain unknown, as does the impact on landscape services. This research defines 5 scenarios of future land-use for Switzerland along axes of Globalisation to Regionalisation and Market-driven developments to high policy intervention. Using the Dyna-CLUE land use modelling framework we incorporate socio-economic and bio-geographical variables to model scenarios of land change for 2035. By identifying locations for key land use transitions which occur across several scenarios, we find that unless large scale policy interventions are made, large areas of the Swiss Plateau and Alpine valley bottoms face strong urbanisation and much of the mountainous pasture agriculture continues to face risk of abandonment.

Results

The results of the scenario modelling are available in raster format for use by interested parties (for non-commercial purposes and with proper acknowledgement) by contacting the primary author Bronwyn Price.

PDF versions of maps for each scenario, hotspots for urbanisation and agricultural land abandonment and land use transition under each scenario (legend in Trend scenario transition map), as well as Google Earth kmz file for hotspots and transitions, are available below for download.