Land resources adaptation planning under changing climate - a study for the Mackenzie Basin

In the last decade, climate change has been one of the major concerns with regard to the health of the earth's ecosystem. The problem of a changing climate is related to not only climate, energy consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases, but also effects of such a change on the earth's ecosystems, resources and human settlements, as well as the need to reduce or avoid these effects. In this study, an inexact-fuzzy multiobjective programming model was proposed for adaptation planning of land resources management in the Mackenzie Basin under changing climate. This integrated adaptation planning enables the inclusion of systems interaction and feedback mechanisms and can therefore yield insights that scattered information cannot offer. Many sectors were considered, including agriculture, forest, wildlife habitat preservation, wetland preservation, hunting, recreation, and soil conservation, as well as their interactive relationships. The results indicate that uncertain, multiobjective, dynamic and interactive features of the study system have been effectively reflected. Temporal variations of land characteristics and and-use activities exist due to changes in climatic, economic and environmental conditions. However, through effective systems analysis and planning, the desired land-use patterns for adapting to the changing climate and compromising objectives from different stakeholders could be obtained. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.