A novel tool implementation to estimate the Land Use Sustainability for crops production under different climate change scenarios

The sustainability of crop production regarding different climate change scenarios will compromise actors and activities involved in agri-food systems. Furthermore, sustainable development was defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development as the ability to meet present demands without compromising the needs of future generations. In parallel, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), land evaluation is the process of projecting land use potential based on its characteristics, and it has been the principal approach used worldwide to manage land use planning. Its use today is required due to changing needs and pressures from decision-making policies or agricultural market tendencies among others, so a rational use of natural land is a crucial goal for economic development. However, future climate change scenarios will modify the actual crop development conditions and must be tackled.

This paper presents two case studies at the river basin scale to determine the Land Use Suitability (LUS) analysis that is performed according to the FAO framework, thus, areas that are the most suitable for crops using GIS and multicriteria methodology that involves actual and future climatic conditions under different climate change scenarios, crop management practices and edaphological conditions for different crops. The tool developed generates a product that classifies areas suitable for a particular crop from a collection of maps and their corresponding thresholds. The approach involves standardizing the suitability maps, assigning relative importance weights to the suitability maps, and then combining the weights and the standardized suitability maps to obtain a suitability score.

In this paper, the wheat crop LUS at the Júcar River Basin (42,735 Km2, located in Spain) and the cotton LUS at the Pinios River Basin 11,000 km2, located in Greece) are evaluated. Once the LUS is estimated, a collection of yearly thematic maps over both river basins is ready for use by local stakeholders, regarding different climate change scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5).

These results are part of the EU Horizon 2020 project REXUS (Managing Resilient Nexus Systems Through Participatory Systems Dynamics Modelling), in which local stakeholders, from farmers to land use managers, are collecting and evaluating the information. Our final goal is to provide spatial information for future climate change scenarios that increase land-use knowledge and enhance decision-making policies.