Research

Future Research

From April 2011 the LADSS team will be helping to deliver the Environmental Change component of the new Scottish Government Research Programme. We will contribute to the Theme entitled A Rural Economy Resilient to Global and Local Change which will have two parts – i) Adaptation to Change in Land Based and Other Rural Industries; and ii) Developing a Low Carbon Rural Economy. This programme is in the process of being commissioned and should be agreed by the end of 2010.

Current Research and Knowledge Exchange

The core our current research portfolio is the Sustainable Farming Systems work package of the Scottish Government research programme – Environment: Land Use and Rural Stewardship. The focus of our research has moved from individual case study analysis to studies with Scotland wide scope and our interests are now in developing and applying the concepts of resilience and adaptive capacity.

During recent years the team have also become more heavily involved with other research funders and at present we are working on the EU FP7 SMILE project and the Interreg IVb funded Aquarius project.

We are also involved in a number of other small projects. See policy support and climate change adaptation for more detailed information on these research areas.

Previous Research

The original focus of the teams research was Land Use Decision Support which mainly involved farm-scale systems modelling that looking at the trade-offs between the components of sustainability. Spinoff projects from this work included contributions to RELU sustainability assessments, carrying out climate change oriented case-studies with Italian colleagues through the British Council and looking at CAP Pillar II payments as part of the AgriGRID FP6 project.