About the project
The goal of the FUTURESCAPES project is to develop a range of plausible global scenarios, broader than currently exists, for future land-use change arising from interactions between climate extremes and technological and social innovations, to increase our understanding of global future risks and opportunities.
Rapid climate, technological, and social change make predicting the future difficult. However, understanding what futures might arise is important to avoid unintended consequences of our actions. At the global scale, a number of ‘plausible futures’ (scenarios) underpin the complex integrated assessment models (IAMs) that underpin the IPCC climate change impact assessments. However, these ‘plausible futures’ capture only a fraction of the possible ‘plausible futures’ that could arise. In this PhD, you will address this research gap via a highly novel approach that links systematic data synthesis with spatial modelling approaches to build ‘futurescapes’ of plausible but unexplored spatial scenarios of land use change at the global scale, and of the consequences of this for biodiversity and food security.
First, you will do a systematic review of all global future scenarios of bioclimatic extreme events, as it is extremes (e.g. heat waves, flooding) that will have the greatest impact, and are also less well represented in IAMs.
Secondly, you will develop data-driven spatial models to understand how emerging technologies (e.g. renewables) and social changes (e.g. activity space and remote working) could lead to re-organization of landscapes, building on past work by the supervisory team (Refs 1,2).
Finally, you will link your new models with existing ones to identify novel threats and opportunities in global landscapes, again building on past work (Refs 3,1). The result will be highly novel and important work that will help to change the conversation about what futures we want for our planet.
