How will different landscapes on Earth react on future climate change?

It is important to find out about future climate change (especially by reconstructing the past), but I think it is even more important for the adaption to future changes if we know how the landscapes we are living in will react on it and how sensitive what kind of landscape is to climate change. Landscape means the natural or semi-natural area where people are living and which can be affected by direct and indirect changes in the hydrological and geomorphological system, e.g. (soil)erosion, vegetation loss or gain, desertification and so on, which all needs to be looked at in a holistic way, subordinated over and including different parts of earth system sciences considering various scales in time and space. The best way to find out about the future then is to look into the past and interpret and combine it with modeling of present landscape processes in different climate regimes. Then we might get a glance on how we have to or can adapt to different future perspectives and climate change however it will be, preserving human’s livelihoods.

How to understand empirical scale relations on the various components of multifunctionality across gradients in management intensity, and their consequences for the scale dependence of tradeoff functions? When is functional segregation better for overall effect, when can fine-grained multifunctionality survive the pressures to specialize?

Scale relations for landscape vary from area-based to various fractal dimensions (e.g. mean versus peak flows of water). This influences the perceptions and measurables of multifunctionality across gradients in management intensity. Tradeoffs shift with scale, as the various functions scale by different rules, yet much of the public discourse looks for scale-independent truths.

How complex multifunctional landscapes will adapt to climate change: The role of science in identifying solutions to be implemented into planning and management.

Adapting landscape systems to climate change is an emerging topic in science. One of the most important challenges for future research will be to integrate research across different scales, including spatio-temporal scales within an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary framework. If we manage to follow this route, science will be able to move from analytical to actionable climate knowledge.

Science has played an important role in putting climate change on the world agenda. We have, now, to recognize and accept that the world’s climate is already changing and will continue to do so for decades. Considering the resulting impacts on land use and biota (Barker et al. 2007; Stern 2007), the option of adapting land use and landscapes to mitigate undesired implications by climate change is now appearing on the political and research agendas. The EU has now published a “white paper” on how it will focus its climate change adaptation policy (Commission of the European Communities 2009). The emphasis is on mainstreaming adaptation measures into EU policies: agriculture, forestry, health, biodiversity, ecosystems and water, coastal and marine areas and production systems and technical infrastructure. In terms of knowledge building, this calls for integrative approaches, crossing economic, social and environmental borderlines. Science is called to play a role in identifying solutions and ways to implement these in complex multifunctional landscape change. Is science ready for this? Our view (Opdam et al 2009) is that for science to get itself well-equipped for this major task, it has to evolve its emphasis from a reductionist, analytical approach aimed at identifying impacts, to a synthetic, design oriented approach aimed at generating solutions (Meinke et al. 2006). (For more details on the subject see: Opdam et al 2009 Landscape Ecology)