National housing and impervious surface scenarios for integrated climate impact assessments

Abstract

Understanding the impacts of climate change on people and the environment requires an understanding of the dynamics of both climate and land use/land cover changes. A range of future climate scenarios is available for the conterminous United States that have been developed based on widely used international greenhouse gas emissions storylines. Climate scenarios derived from these emissions storylines have not been matched with logically consistent land use/cover maps for the United States. This gap is a critical barrier to conducting effective integrated assessments. This study develops novel national scenarios of housing density and impervious surface cover that are logically consistent with emissions storylines. Analysis of these scenarios suggests that combinations of climate and land use/cover can be important in determining environmental conditions regulated under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. We found significant differences in patterns of habitat loss and the distribution of potentially impaired watersheds among scenarios, indicating that compact development patterns can reduce habitat loss and the number of impaired watersheds. These scenarios are also associated with lower global greenhouse gas emissions and, consequently, the potential to reduce both the drivers of anthropogenic climate change and the impacts of changing conditions. The residential housing and impervious surface datasets provide a substantial first step toward comprehensive national land use/land cover scenarios, which have broad applicability for integrated assessments as these data and tools are publicly available.urbanization | land planning | water quality L and-use and land-cover change are recognized to have global consequences (1) and demographic trends drive land development, including residential housing, which define many landscapes (2). However, it remains challenging to develop a deeper understanding of the consequences of these changes because most urban-growth models that can incorporate policy drivers are limited to local and regional scales (e.g., ref. 3, but see ref. 4). This gap limits the effectiveness of integrated assessments of global change impacts, particularly to assess the combined effects of land use and climate change on environmental endpoints. Moreover, in this context it is important for scenarios of growth and development to be consistent with the assumptions used to develop global climate-change scenarios and storylines (5-7).Land-use change plays a central role in determining the consequences of climate change for people and the environment (8, 9), and has consequences for many environmental endpoints, such as water and air quality (10-12). These complex interactions influence the condition of resources regulated under the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts and are important considerations to include in planning and policy analyses. For example, changes in water quality and effects on aquatic ecosystems have a strong linkage with impervious surface cover associated with development (13). Here we prov...

Integrated climate and land use change scenarios for California rangeland ecosystem services: wildlife habitat, soil carbon, and water supply

“…Across the United States, disproportionate land use changes are expected to continue to occur on grasslands and shrublands for multiple future scenarios (Bierwagen et al 2010). Mirroring this pattern, in the Central Valley, more than half of the land area is predicted to change by 2051 (Radeloff et al 2012), with an increase in irrigated pasture and urban lands and a decrease in rangelands.…”

“…These storylines can serve as the basis for developing an integrated narrative of both climate and LULC change, and their combined impacts to a suite of biological resources and ecosystem services. Few studies have examined the combined effects of climate and land use change (de Chazal and Rounsevell 2009;Bierwagen et al 2010). One example is a California study that found that for many bird populations, the potential impacts of development can be as great as or greater than the effects of climate change, and threats may vary in different combinations across the landscape (Jongsomjit et al 2013).…”

“…In order to conduct an effective integrated assessment that addresses the impacts of climate change and land use-land cover change (LULC), it is critical that climate scenarios be matched with logically consistent LULC scenarios derived from the same storylines (Bierwagen et al 2010 Vuuren et al 2011) provide storylines of future greenhouse gas emissions. These storylines can serve as the basis for developing an integrated narrative of both climate and LULC change, and their combined impacts to a suite of biological resources and ecosystem services.…”

Innovations in science and scenarios for assessment

“…Their consistency with the climate scenarios and information was one of the factors that supported their use. The scenarios present information on housing density and impervious surface cover that are consistent with the SRES storylines (Bierwagen et al 2010). …”

Agricultural Sustainability

“…Road, roof, and parking surfaces within urban areas have been shown to lead to increased speed and volume of stormwater runoff and lower groundwater recharge (Erickson and Stefan 2009). In a nationwide assessment, the large increase in population and assumption of dispersed development under the A2 scenario results in about 10 percent increase in the surface area of impervious surfaces compared to the B1 storyline, and at least one-third of the nation's wetlands will be affected by 2050 in both scenarios (Bierwagen et al 2010). Urban planning to date has done relatively little to try to mitigate these effects, and by extension our A2 scenario might continue to produce them, especially since the urban footprint would expand under a "business as usual" storyline.…”