Agent-Based Modeling for analyzing the climate resilience and decision-making impact on drought dynamics in Cultural Landscapes

The development of an Agent-Based Model (ABM) has proven highly effective for analyzing how the behavior of different agents leads to aggregated phenomena. Despite the challenges in creating such a model—including conceptualization, agent definition, relationship establishment, behavior design, programming, testing, validation, and reporting—the process allows for valuable testing and rethinking of strategies for enhancing the resilience of cultural landscapes, as the results offer significant insights into phenomena like drought. While not predictive, the observed trends can inform general analysis and highlight key areas for action to achieve specific goals. The RescueMe project developed an ABM that simulates three types of administration and underscores the impact of decision-making on territorial resilience, significantly influenced by timely policies and actions. The primary goal of the model is to simulate how farmers, agricultural plots, and decision-makers interact with each other and their environment, particularly under varying drought conditions. The model tests the hypothesis that decision-makers can intervene to mitigate the effects of drought by creating mechanisms that enhance plot resilience and/or attract new farmers safeguarding the values of the cultural landscapes. In this way, the ABM aims to develop a reflection and awareness-raising tool to allow cultural landscapes to consider the consequences of different climate change adaptation measures and behaviors. The impact chains co-created with the project case studies have been used as a basis for the modeling. The impact chain of drought on agriculture (impact of specific climatic hazards on a given sector) was selected due to its importance for a significant number of cultural landscapes, and the organigraphs created during the early stages of the project were used to help define the agents. The scenarios generated with the ABM simulate the impact of the behavior of agents on landscape resilience and potentially inform the definition of a serious game.