Background and methods

According to current climate scenarios for Switzerland and for the 21st century, strong changes in temperature and precipitation patterns are anticipated. These changes are likely to profoundly transform existing landscapes, which calls for caution as these landscapes and their diversity represent a key resource for Switzerland's life quality and economy. Thus, transformations in typical (cultural) landscapes induced by changes in climate can have undesirable social and economic consequences, which in turn are exacerbated by the fact that public policies are typically sectorial.
Despite the importance of landscapes for Switzerland, their possible modifications in response to climate change have so far only been the subject of a limited number of studies. To date, the necessary knowledge and tools are therefore lacking to raise public awareness about the evolution of Swiss landscapes in response to climatic changes. Such tools would also help the formulation of cross-sectoral public policies likely to contribute to the preservation of unique landscape features that are essential for Switzerland. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to develop tools to understand, track, and anticipate landscape transformations as well as the changes in the services these landscape offer to society. In this context, the landscape indicators are interesting because they describe the evolution of landscapes in an objective manner and thus constitute decision-making aid instruments.

In this project we propose to project the possible effects of climate change on the most important landscape types of Switzerland and to thereby enable the animated visualization of these effects for communication and awareness raising purposes. Specifically, we propose to:

• develop qualitative narratives of landscape changes based on literature and expert consultations (Module 1)
• quantify and spatialize these scenarios for the periods 2050 and 2100 for the mountain region Entremont and a region of the Plateau using projections of landscapes as well as biophysical indicators and landscape services (Module 2)
• develop visualizations (Module 3) from the stories of Module 1 and quantitative projections of Module 2

This project is a collaboration between the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mountain Research of the University of Lausanne (ICMR), the Fondation Jean-Marcel Aubert in Champex-Lac, the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment, the Swiss Foundation for Landscape Conservation (Fondation suisse pour la protection et l'aménagement du paysage), the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL), and Ikonaut GmbH.