Meeting sustainable development challenges in growing cities: Coupled social-ecological systems modeling of land use and water changes

Ongoing urban expansion may degrade natural resources, ecosystems, and the services they provide to human societies, e.g., through land use and water changes and feedbacks. In order to control and minimize such negative impacts of urbanization, best practices for sustainable urban development must be identified, supported, and reinforced. To accomplish this, assessment methods and tools need to consider the couplings and feedbacks between social and ecological systems, as the basis for improving the planning and management of urban development. Collaborative efforts by academics, urban planners, and other relevant actors are also essential in this context. This will require relevant methods and tools for testing and projecting scenarios of coupled social-ecological system (CSES) behavior, changes, and feedbacks, in support of sustainable development of growing cities. This paper presents a CSES modeling approach that can provide such support, by coupling socio-economically driven land use changes and associated hydrological changes. The paper exemplifies and tests the applicability of this approach for a concrete case study with relevant data availability, the Tyresån catchment in Stockholm County, Sweden. Results show that model integration in the approach can reveal impacts of urbanization on hydrological and water resource, and the implications and feedbacks for urban societies and ecosystems. The CSES approach introduces new model challenges, but holds promise for improved model support towards sustainable urban development.