Storylines for land use change
In order to find solutions to the problem of desertification, sustainable land use policies and degradation management strategies were created. They addressed specific problems of desertification and sustainable development at various scales. The project was structured into four modules which cover land management concerns, scenario-generation and policy formulation at various scales including local and Mediterranean. The scenarios are essentially in the structure of narrative storylines which focus on short-term developments and integrate the socio-economic and ecological factors along with those that are policy-related. In this way, short-term objectives can be merged with long-term perspectives and they span the period between the years 2000 and 2030. The following three scenarios or storylines are available: 'knowledge is king', 'big is beautiful' and 'convulsive change'. The Mediterranean scenarios were created by downsizing the European scenarios. Therefore, the same three scenarios exist but they are more tailored to each country-level and sectoral information, especially for agriculture and tourism. The full storylines are comprised in twenty to twenty-five pages, describing major future changes in the Mediterranean and for Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal.
