Land Use Trade-Offs (LUTO) Model
LUTO is an integrated environmental and economic model which estimates Australian land use futures under alternative global change and policy scenarios. LUTO has been fully described, tested, applied, and evaluated. The LUTO model takes an agricultural land use map as the baseline, and then combines a range of environmental and economic data to identify potential land use change (agriculture, carbon plantings, environmental plantings, bioenergy, and biofuels) and corresponding supply of ecosystem services (agriculture, emissions abatement, water resources, biodiversity services, bioenergy, and biofuel production). The model works at a grid cell resolution of 0.01 degrees (~1.1 km) and an annual time-step from 2013 – 2050. The LUTO model is a bottom-up model which identifies the location, type, and timing of potential land use change given changes in the relative profitability of land use options as determined by productivity, prices, costs, and adoption behaviour. Key uncertainties were considered including different rates of land use change adoption and productivity growth. Future trajectories in external drivers and domestic policy which influence productivity, prices, and costs were also considered. These included a carbon price, energy price, and food demand as derived by integrated assessment of global outlooks, and the establishment of new markets for biofuel and biodiversity. The biofuel market assumes the availability of nearby demand for wheat crop grain and residue. The biodiversity market includes a discriminatory payment scheme where landholders are paid the opportunity cost of adoption environmental plantings. LUTO identifies potential land use transitions over space and time, and estimates the resulting impact on supply of the five ecosystem services. The latest version of the model is provided here as used to run the 648 scenarios in Bryan et. al. 2015. Input data is available in the CSIRO DAP collection Land Use Trade-Offs (LUTO) Model Input Data from https://doi.org/10.25919/591f-8m60.