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May 26 – 31, 2024
Western University
America/Toronto timezone
Welcome to the 2024 CAP Congress Program website! / Bienvenue au siteweb du programme du Congrès de l'ACP 2024!

(G*) Giving new meaning to "Physical Geography": Physics-based approaches to problems in planning

May 28, 2024, 11:00 AM
15m
PAB Rm 150 (cap. 48) (Physics & Astronomy Bldg., Western U. )

PAB Rm 150 (cap. 48)

Physics & Astronomy Bldg., Western U.

Oral Competition (Graduate Student) / Compétition orale (Étudiant(e) du 2e ou 3e cycle) Applied Physics and Instrumentation / Physique appliquée et de l'instrumentation (DAPI / DPAI) (DAPI) T1-10 Applied Physics II | Physique appliquée II (DPAI)

Speaker

Hazhir Aliahmadi (Queen's University)

Description

Land-use decision-making processes have a long history of producing globally pervasive systemic equity and sustainability concerns. Quantitative, optimization-based planning approaches, e.g., Multi-Objective Land Allocation (MOLA), seemingly open the possibility of improving objectivity and transparency by explicitly evaluating planning priorities by land use type, amount, and location. Here, we primary show that optimization-based planning approaches with generic planning criteria generate a series of unstable “flashpoints” whereby tiny changes in planning priorities produce large-scale changes in the amount of land use by type. We give quantitative arguments that the flashpoints we uncover in MOLA models are examples of a more general family of instabilities that occur whenever planning accounts for factors that coordinate use on- and between-sites, regardless of whether these planning factors are formulated explicitly or implicitly. Building on this, our current research extends into the realm of environmental change, revealing that common features across non-convex optimization problems, like MOLA, drive hypersensitivity to climate-induced degradation, resulting in catastrophic losses in human systems well before catastrophic climate collapse. This punctuated insensitive/hypersensitive degradation–loss response, traced to the contrasting effects of environmental degradation on subleading local versus global optima (SLO/GO), suggests substantial social and economic risks across a broad range of human systems reliant on optimization, even in the absence of extreme environmental changes.

Keyword-1 Land-Use planning
Keyword-2 Climate change

Primary authors

Hazhir Aliahmadi (Queen's University) Sierra Cabrera (Queen's University) Maeve Beckett (Queen's University) Sam Connolly (Queen's University) Irina Babayan (Queen's University) Dongmei Chen (Queen's University) Greg van Anders

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.