Societal breakdown as an emergent property of large-scale behavioural models of land use change

Brown, Calum; Seo, Bumsuk; Rounsevell, Mark

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-10-809-2019

Articles | Volume 10, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-10-809-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-10-809-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 10, issue 4

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

04 Dec 2019

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 04 Dec 2019

Societal breakdown as an emergent property of large-scale behavioural models of land use change

Calum Brown, Bumsuk Seo, and Mark Rounsevell

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Final revised paper (published on 04 Dec 2019)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 23 May 2019)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Main review comments', Patrick Meyfroidt, 20 Jun 2019
- AC1: 'Author responses', Calum Brown, 10 Aug 2019
RC2: 'Review comments to manuscript "Societal breakdown as an emergent property of large-scale behavioural models of land use change"', Gunnar Dressler, 03 Jul 2019
- AC2: 'Author responses', Calum Brown, 10 Aug 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (02 Sep 2019) by Michel Crucifix

AR by Calum Brown on behalf of the Authors (15 Sep 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Sep 2019) by Michel Crucifix

RR by Patrick Meyfroidt (07 Oct 2019)

RR by Gunnar Dressler (22 Oct 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

In the revised version of the manuscript, the authors have addressed most of the issues raised in the initial review and have improved the overall quality of the manuscript. The additional descriptions in the methods section (particularly 2.2, 2.4 & 2.5) have clarified most of the aspects that where not clear in the initial version, although some aspects could still be improved. The same holds for the results section. Therefore, I have a couple of points that I think should still be addressed before the publication of the manuscript:

Methods section:

Section 2.4.: the description of agent competition for cells is still not entirely clear to me: You state that “agents did not optimise their land uses according to benefit values, and these values were not used to ensure full supply of each service. Instead benefit values responded in defined ways to changes in demand and supply levels, stimulating production, but not guaranteeing a given production level.“ (p.6., l. 1-5). However, in the baseline case where there are no differences in behavioral parameters, agents are fully rational profit maximizers – and although I understand that the behavioral thresholds of abandonment and competition define why agents may persist with a land use, although it is not the one with the highest benefit, I would rather understand this as a constrained optimization, where the thresholds define some boundary conditions. If this is not the case, you should state more clearly how “benefit values responded in defined ways to changes in demand and supply levels” – i.e. what these defined ways are.

The parameter description in section 2.6. is much better than in the previous version. However, what I am missing is a general overview on the behavioral parameters and their meaning: you mention that AFTs differ in their behavior in section 2.2 (pointing to section 2.6). Then you mention the competition and abandonment threshold first in section 2.4. (without stating that these are the behavioral traits of the AFTs), and finally you describe how behavioral paramaters are varied in different sets in section 2.6. – without referring to what parameters are included in these sets, which only becomes apparent in the appendix. Without consulting the appendix, the reader has no clear idea about the behavioral parameters. Adding a short table to the main text with an overview on the parameters and a short definition would drastically improve the understanding – especially as the behavioral differentiation of the AFTs is such a central part of the manuscript.

Results section:

Some ambiguities still exist in the paragraph on behavioral parameter variation (section 3.2, p. 10, l.7-27):

You state that “In two scenarios (RCP2.6-SSP4 and RCP4.5-SSP3), behavioural parameterisations determinded whether food was over- or under-supplied by the 2020s” (p.10, l. 13-15) – but you don’t state which behavioral parameter set led to which outcome.

I very much appreciate the further simulations and in detail investigation on the effects of the behavioral parameters and you state how the distribution of behavioral parameters changes - “higher values of competition thresholds, lower values of abandonment thresholds and lower variation between agents demonstrating a disproportionate persistence of agents who are relatively unlikely to respond to benefit values” (p. 10, l. 25-26) – but you don’t state the reasons for the shift towards these values. Couldn’t there be also cases where mostly agent’s that are always responding to benefit values persist?

In general, I still think that more of the analysis and explanation of the behavioral parameter variation should be placed in the main text, as it is a core part of the model and highlights the "added value" of the model, compared to other large scale land-use models.

Figure 2: The figure is much better now but consider adding a grid to improve the readability (similar to Figure B2).

Appendix C:

Figure C1: You use fractal dimension as a measure – this is not a standard measure, so please shortly state, what it means.

Figure C2: I acknowledge that you chose the color sets of paramset2/4 and 3/5 to be similar, but colors are very difficult to distinguish in the plots – consider adjusting these.

All other points raised in the initial review and all the minor technical corrections have been satisfyingly addressed.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (22 Oct 2019) by Michel Crucifix

AR by Calum Brown on behalf of the Authors (22 Oct 2019)

ED: Publish as is (05 Nov 2019) by Michel Crucifix

AR by Calum Brown on behalf of the Authors (06 Nov 2019)

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Short summary

Concerns are growing that human activity will lead to social and environmental breakdown, but it is hard to anticipate when and where such breakdowns might occur. We developed a new model of land management decisions in Europe to explore possible future changes and found that decision-making that takes into account social and environmental conditions can produce unexpected outcomes that include societal breakdown in challenging conditions.