Preliminary Steps Towards Integrating Climate and Land Use (ICLUS): the Development of Land-Use Scenarios Consistent with Climate Change Emissions Storylines (External Review Draft)

Climate change interacts with existing and future land uses, such as residential housing and roads. Up to now, there have been no scenarios of land-use changes for the U.S. that are consistent with the storylines of population growth, greenhouse-gas emissions, and socio-economic changes used by climate-change modelers. The lack of these consistent scenarios has impeded progress of integrated assessments of climate and land-use change on endpoints of concern, such as water quality, aquatic ecosystems, air quality, and human health. This draft report describes the methods used to develop land-use scenarios by decade from the year 2000 to 2100 that are consistent with these storylines. A demographic model feeds population projections into another model that distributes new housing across the landscape. The scenarios cover the 48 contiguous U.S. states. The draft report also describes the conversion of housing density to impervious surface cover and provides an initial analysis of changes in watersheds across the United States. Other analyses include regional trends in population growth and in housing density. This draft report provides technical modeling details and describes potential next steps to integrate climate change variables into the model.

30 day public comment period beginning late Jul 2008
External letter review projected late Aug 2008

The final report will be published after addressing public and external review comments.