Paper ID: 2311.12304

Discovering Effective Policies for Land-Use Planning with Neuroevolution

Risto Miikkulainen, Olivier Francon, Daniel Young, Elliot Meyerson, Clemens Schwingshackl, Jacob Bieker, Hugo Cunha, Babak Hodjat

How areas of land are allocated for different uses, such as forests, urban areas, and agriculture, has a large effect on the terrestrial carbon balance, and therefore climate change. Based on available historical data on land-use changes and a simulation of the associated carbon emissions and removals, a surrogate model can be learned that makes it possible to evaluate the different options available to decision-makers efficiently. An evolutionary search process can then be used to discover effective land-use policies for specific locations. Such a system was built on the Project Resilience platform and evaluated with the Land-Use Harmonization dataset LUH2 and the bookkeeping model BLUE. It generates Pareto fronts that trade off carbon impact and amount of land-use change customized to different locations, thus providing a potentially useful tool for land-use planning.

Submitted: Nov 21, 2023