Land Use Calculator

Global human population is expected to continue to grow over the next four decades. The ensuing demands for water, food and energy are expected to intensify land-use conflicts, contribute to greenhouse-gas emissions, and exacerbate threats to natural ecosystems and wildlife. Therefore, we need to develop ways to balance our growing consumptive needs with environmental protection, particularly in the developing tropics where population growth has been most rapid, the people are poorest, and biodiversity is richest and yet most threatened globally. The Land Use Calculator is a decision-support tool targeted at land-use decision-makers in the tropics. This tool allows end-users to evaluate the implications and tradeoffs of pursuing alternative development scenarios by simultaneously taking account of the societal priorities of agricultural production, economic development, carbon conservation and biodiversity protection. The Land Use Calculator is designed to be user-friendly and interactive. Users simply have to specify a few environmental and socioeconomic parameters describing a landscape scenario. And the tool immediately determines the implications of that scenario in terms of biodiversity, carbon stocks, greenhouse-gas emissions,  financial returns of the land and even employment opportunities.