Interactions between land use change, regional development, and climate change in the Poyang Lake district from 1985 to 2035

Land use change and climate change are two major global modifications of our environment and are predicted to continue in the future. To assess how climate change affects land use and regional development in the Poyang Lake district in China, we use agent-based modeling and simulate the physical and socio-economic drivers within two interactive sub-models for urban expansion and rural development. The modeling outputs from 1985 to 2005 show good agreement with the observed land use change. Possible land use changes and regional development paths until 2035 are examined for three SRES scenarios including A1B (rapid growth), A2 (regional-diversified growth) and B1 (growth with clean technologies). The results show that climate change induced impacts on land use change and regional development are highly relevant and may even amplify the complex interactions. In particular, cropland, forest, water area, urban, and grassland are more sensitive to these changes than unused land. The more environmental friendly B1 scenario results in less concerning land use changes.