CC-LandStraD: Climate Change - Land Use Strategies | Umweltbundesamt

The regional statistical climate model STAR will be used. The Statistical Regional Model (STAR) was developed to augment the climate simulation results of global models, to reduce the inaccuracies in regional applicability to a minimum.

The core of the project is also to develop land use scenarios for 2030. To this end, it is oriented towards the built environment, particularly settlement areas. The expected land use and scenarios for 2030 are based on a trend forecast (business as usual). The land use scenarios serve to develop regionalised forecasts for settlement and transport areas. They are also intended to help quantify the remaining open areas for other land uses, such as agriculture and forestry, and, moreover, to explore strategies for developing settlement areas with a reduced carbon footprint. The results will be examined in terms of their climate effects.

relative humidity, radiation

2060

Together with the way we use our land, more frequent extreme temperatures, increased precipitation in the winter, reduced precipitation in spring and summer, and longer dry periods in the summer, will all influence nature, the ecology, and the perceived landscapes of our environment. Additional climate protection and climate adaptation requirements exacerbate the land use conflicts that already exist.

CC-LandStraD aims at developing socially acceptable land use strategies for Germany. This includes land use strategies for climate protection (mitigation) and climate adaptation to counter the effects of the climate change. To this end, the interactions between the climate change and land use will be analysed throughout Germany. Based on the interactions between land use and the climate change that are identified, the project will develop optional courses of action and measures that have a positive effect on climate protection and take the adaptation to the climate change into account . The possibilities for implementing these optional courses of action and measures will be tested by way of example, using regional participation processes in two selected case study regions (the Altmark and regions in the Cologne Lowlands).

Background:
In recent years, the demands on land use policy for contributing to climate protection goals have increased. For example, the quantities of carbon and other greenhouse gases bound in the soil and vegetation can be maintained and even increased with the aid of suitable land management policies. A further possibility is to replace energy generated by fossil fuel combustion with renewable energy obtained from biomass sources. The potential of land management to contribute to climate protection is determined by complex interactions between the land use changes and the geo-biosphere that have not yet been fully clarified.

Objectives:
The feasibility of land use strategies with which climate protection objectives can be achieved is to be tested in the example regions, also taking the legal framework into account.