Future environmental change impacts on rural land use and biodiversity: a synthesis of the ACCELERATES project

The ACCELERATES project aimed to assess the vulnerability of European agro-ecosystems to environmental change in support of the conventions of climate change and biological diversity. This was based on a study of the impact of environmental change on land use and biodiversity (for selected species and habitats) in agro-ecosystems. The approach integrated existing models of agricultural land use, species distribution and habitat fragmentation within a common scenario framework, so that impacts could be synthesised for different global change problems. The results suggest that policy and conservation strategies should not tackle the vulnerability of agriculture and biodiversity independently. Potential changes within one sector may have important opportunities for another sector that policy could fail to exploit, or positive outcomes in one sector could have adverse effects elsewhere. For example, there are potential benefits to conservation management that arise from agricultural land abandonment or extensification. However, agricultural land abandonment increases the vulnerability of farmers. Society, through policy, will need, therefore, to resolve the conflicts that are likely to arise between agriculture and the conservation of biodiversity in the future. The scientific community can contribute to this process by seeking to reduce the uncertainties that bedevil future environmental change assessments, through the development of better and more integrated methods (of modelling and scenario development) to analyse and interpret cross-sectoral vulnerability.