Chapter 4: Land Use Dynamics and Coastal Management

Changes in climate risk are driven by a range of socio-economic factors, as well as the climatic drivers considered in Chapters 2 and 3. Exploring how the built environment might change over time is an essential element for assessing changing risks. Either overlooked or expert judgment based, the underlying logic of future land-use change is not always apparent. Two approaches used in the Tyndall Coastal Simulator to downscale socio-economic storylines are presented and compared in this chapter. Both methods consistently and transparently analyse local changes in land plots used for residential and other urban activities. The first uses the multi-criteria analysis to calculate spatial weights based on the degree of attraction of features such as transport, existing development, flood risk, and proximity to the coast to identify the development patterns under different socio-economic futures. The second method uses the Agent-Based Modelling paradigm. It approaches the interactions occurring between residential households and local planners as a demand-supply process that produces possible development patterns under different socio-economic futures. The core elements of this complex system are the location preferences of (changing) individual residential agents and the constraints dynamically imposed by planners through land-use policy. Whilst the first method requires fewer variable inputs, the second method allows for non-monotonous landscape evolution and adapting policy response to local changes. As a result, the multi-criteria method is easy to implement and it provides flexible tools that can be used for first-step socio-economic scenarios development. Conversely, the Agent-Based method captures local behaviour and relates on the iterative characteristic of urban dynamics. ABM provides more detailed results of local changes with explanation of potential reasons for urban development patterns. In both cases, they key outputs are plausible distributions of urban dwellings in East Anglia over the 21st Century under four different socio-economic storylines. These maps are key information for a risk assessment in coastal management, as performed in chapter 9.