Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT): modeling the impacts of land-use-related policies

The principle of multifunctionality simultaneously considers a variety of social, economic and environmental goods and services related to land use. It is thus a key to the sustainable evelopment of land and rural areas. Land-use policies seek to support the economic competitiveness and sustainable development of rural areas. For efficient impact assessment, policy-makers require tools for the assessment of anticipated policy impacts on a wide range of sustainability issues across European regions. The European Unionfunded integrated project SENSOR develops ex-ante Sustainability Impact Assessment Tools (SIAT) to support decision-making on policies related to multifunctional land use in European regions. SENSOR directly responds to the European sustainability objectives as applied to land use and rural development. This paper provides an overview on the analytical approach of SIAT and documents preliminary results. The SIAT methodological framework for scenario development and land-use modeling including indicator analysis is described. The first results on the identification of end user needs as well as the design of the first SIAT prototype are reported. Finally, major conclusions on the SIAT methodological approach are discussed as well as its use for sustainability impact assessments.