Modeling biodiversity strengthens SEA and land use planning

Quantitative and spatial information on future land use and biodiversity is often lacking in SEA's and even in land use planning. Land use changes have a large impact on biodiversity and people and need to be looked upon from a national scale. The objective of this paper is to convince decision makers and SEA practitioners that land use and biodiversity modeling can add useful information to a SEA process and land use plans. This is illustrated with an example for the Quang Nam Land use plan SEA. Policymakers are increasingly aware of the risks of uncontrolled biodiversity loss, and need to be well informed about expected levels of loss. They need information about current and expected trends in biodiversity change. Existing information on biodiversity is often fragmented and of variable quality. Additional insights are needed into the main driving forces of biodiversity loss, such as land-use change, so that a policy maker will be able to identify underlying processes causing these losses. Biodiversity modeling can provide this information and can be used as a decision support tool. The aim of the tool is to support decision makers with adjusting existing policies and with designing of alternative policy options that take environmental objectives into account. Using models as a tool in the decision-making process related to biodiversity aspects on regional and (sub-)national scales is relatively new, but is likely to become the norm. GLOBIO3 biodiversity model The GLOBIO3 model has been developed to assess human-induced changes in terrestrial biodiversity, in past present and future at national, regional and global scales (Alkemade et al, 2009). Different types of models can be used for understanding the relation between biodiversity changes and their causes. The GLOBIO3 model is a pressure-based model that can be used even if only limited information on biodiversity is available. The GLOBIO3 model uses one of the indicator types listed by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD, 2006): the Mean abundance of original Species relative to their Abundance in undisturbed ecosystems (MSA). It describes thenaturalnessof an area compared to its undisturbed situation. The MSA indicator combines ecosystem extent (quantity) with ecosystem quality. The indicator does not have to be measured in the field, which in general would be time consuming and costly, but can be calculated by using existing information on driving forces. GLOBIO3 is built on simple cause-effect relationships between pressures and biodiversity impacts. The model determines the combined impact of the following pressures: land-use change, infrastructure development, fragmentation, climate change and in some cases atmospheric nitrogen deposition. In addition, population pressure is used as an additional pressure to determine the impact of infrastructural development. The intensity of these pressures is derived from available statistical data, spatial maps, other models and expert knowledge. The cause-effect relationships of the different pressures on biodiversity are derived from available literature, using meta-analysis for comparable ecosystems. The quality of this generic information can be improved for local conditions with the help of local data sets and expert knowledge. GLOBIO3 has been used successfully in several integrated assessments on global, regional, national and sub-national (Alkemade et al., 2009). Recently the GLOBIO-aquatic model has been developed for the assessment of inland aquatic ecosystems.