An Agent-Based Reasoning of Impacts of Regional Climate Changes on Land Use Changes in the Three-River Headwaters Region of China

Abstract EN

The land surface in Three-River Headwaters Region (TRHR), a typical ecological fragile zone of China, is quite sensitive to the climate changes which will destabilize certain ecosystem services valuable to the entire nation and neighboring countries.

This study aimed to analyze the impacts of climate changes and agents’ adaptive behaviors on the regional land use changes with the agent based model (ABM).

First, the main agents were extracted according to the production resources endowments and socioeconomic background.

Then the agents’ land use behaviors were analyzed and parameterized.

Thereafter, the ABM model was built to simulate the impacts of the climate changes on the regional land use changes and agents’ economic benefits.

The results showed that the land use changes were mainly characterized by the increase of grassland and decrease of unused land area.

Besides, the agents would get more wealth under the scenario without climate changes in the long term, even though the total income is lower than that under the scenario with climate changes.

In addition, the sensitivity analysis indicated that the model is sensitive to the climatic conditions, market price of agricultural and animal husbandry products, government subsidies, and cost control.