Discovering the full potential of interconnected natural resources

Project Highlights: 

• Learn a suite of new skills in natural resources and landscape management.

• Develop methods for strategic multi-criteria decision-making for achieving optimal combinations of land use allocation.

• Work across disciplines to build and employ “next generation” resource classification tools.

Overview: The transition of energy systems away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy will lead to increasing demand for different natural resources; as fossil fuel production reduces, then extraction of mineral products will need to increase. This has implications for land use (requiring the conversion of agricultural land or wilderness to mining) and the associated suite of ecosystem services which are delivered from the landscape (e.g. the regulation of flood risk and water quality, carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation, maintaining and improving biodiversity and the provision of cultural services, such as recreation, as well as the production of food and fibre.

Policymakers must attempt to balance out these sometimes competing, and sometimes complimentary land uses, and increasingly they must make decisions based on achieving a wide range of economic, environmental and social objectives. These decisions are confounded by climate change, which adds additional uncertainty to future projections. It is, therefore, increasingly clear that new modelling approaches will be needed to evaluate the complex trade-offs and synergies associated with different land use and natural resources management scenarios. The United Nations Framework Classification (UNFC) of natural resources is a recently-refreshed tool to allow policymakers to make strategic decisions at a regional scale. It is an example of a growing trend to include more holistic principles in planning and landscape decisions. In parallel, developments in multi-objective optimisation now allow different combinations of land use allocation to be evaluated – predicting a range of compromise solutions which allow manifold outcomes to be achieved. In this project you will investigate how tools such as the UNFC can be used to explore the social, environmental and economic costs and benefits of different combinations land use and natural resources management, with a focus on mineral resource extraction, agriculture and rewilding. The project will develop a case study based on a rich dataset from Aberdeenshire, UK. 

Full details of the TARGET CDT https://target.le.ac.uk/

Entry criteria and application link https://le.ac.uk/study/research-degrees/funded-opportunities/target-studentship