Discovering effective policies for land-use planning with neuroevolution

How areas of land are allocated for different uses, such as forests, urban areas, and agriculture, has a large effect on the terrestrial carbon balance and, therefore, climate change. Based on available historical data on land-use changes and a simulation of the associated carbon emissions and remov...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Daniel Young, Olivier Francon, Elliot Meyerson, Clemens Schwingshackl, Jacob Bieker, Hugo Cunha, Babak Hodjat, Risto Miikkulainen
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press 2025-01-01
Series:Environmental Data Science
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Online Access:https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2634460225000184/type/journal_article
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Summary:How areas of land are allocated for different uses, such as forests, urban areas, and agriculture, has a large effect on the terrestrial carbon balance and, therefore, climate change. Based on available historical data on land-use changes and a simulation of the associated carbon emissions and removals, a surrogate model can be learned that makes it possible to evaluate the different options available to decision-makers efficiently. An evolutionary search process can then be used to discover effective land-use policies for specific locations. Such a system was built on the Project Resilience platform and evaluated with the Land-Use Harmonization dataset LUH2 and the bookkeeping model BLUE. It generates Pareto fronts that trade off carbon impact and amount of land-use change customized to different locations, thus providing a proof-of-concept tool that is potentially useful for land-use planning.
ISSN:2634-4602