National Center for Environmental Assess

Land-use Scenarios: National-scale Housing-density Scenarios Consistent with Climate Change Storylines National Center for Environmental Assess

Publisher Marketing: Climate and land-use change are major components of global environmental change with feedbacks between these components. The consequences of these interactions show that land use may exacerbate or alleviate climate-change effects. Based on these findings it is important to use land-use scenarios that are consistent with the specific assumptions underlying climate-change scenarios. The Integrated Climate and Land-Use Scenarios (ICLUS) project developed land-use outputs that are based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) social, economic, and demographic storylines and adapted these to the United States. ICLUS outputs are derived from a pair of models. A demographic model generates population estimates that are distributed by the spatial allocation model as housing density (HD) across the landscape; land-use outputs were developed for the four main SRES storylines and a base case. The model is run for the conterminous United States and output is available for each scenario by decade to 2100. In addition to maps of HD across the conterminous United States, this project also generated maps of impervious surface (IS) cover based on the HD projections. This report describes the modeling methodology for, some initial analyses using ICLUS outputs, and recommendations for further research.