Richard James Hewitt

Complutense University of Madrid | UCM · Facultad de Geografía e Historia

Citizen-driven Renewable Energy (RE) projects of various kinds, known collectively as community energy (CE), have an important part to play in the worldwide transition to cleaner energy systems. On the basis of evidence from literature review and an exploratory survey of 8 European countries, we investigate European CE through the lens of Social In...

Reuse preferences for post‐agricultural brownfields on former socialist agricultural premises in CEE countries are likely to be diverse and may depend on communities' experiences. Our research question is to reveal, through a questionnaire survey of 774 respondents from 180 communities, the difference in reuse preferences among communities with dif...

The paper presents a simple directed cellular automata model for the R environment, applied to model the spatial diffusion of a hypothetical past hominin population. At the model start time, an agent (individual or group) occupies a cell, and scans the cell neighbourhood for the most suitable next step. A cost function is implemented whereby the ag...

Forest expansion can make an important contribution to the 2015 Paris Agreement, through offsetting Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. EU, UK and Scottish forest policy encourages substantial forest expansion. Unfortunately, policy is still inadequately informed by high resolution data, and often assumes a fairly homogenous landscape, uniformly suitab...

Accurate predictions of land-use change are important for supporting planning. Cellular automata (CA) models are widely used to simulate real-world urban land-use change but accurately modeling complex spatial urban patterns and dynamics can be challenging due to the high degree of subjectivity involved in CA model parameterisation. Advances in dee...

Cellular automata models are popular tools for exploring future land change pathways. But simulation modelling approaches often focus too narrowly on calibration against historic reference maps, limiting the diversity of possible outcomes. We argue that, contrary to what is commonly believed, there is no ‘best model’, and that model specification a...

We aim to contribute to in-depth comprehension of the factors and preferences behind the reuses of large-scale underused or abandoned former collective farms from the 1950s–1980s for biogas plants and solar photovoltaic power plants. As a case study, three regions in the southern part of the Czech Republic have been selected. Our findings signal th...

Coastal and terrestrial fisheries communities in Europe, often economically marginalised, are likely to face severe impacts as climate change becomes more acute. Although progress on climate mitigation and adaptation from national governments remains slow, local development actions can also address these impacts from the bottom up. In this paper we...

Cellular Automata applied to geographic information systems have allowed the use of new scientific paradigms in the analysis of the environment. The present work is located within urban geography, where, based on a series of rules applied to Cellular Automata, such as neighborhood, accessibility, relief, stochastic factor and fitness, the analysis...

Climate change is likely to increase droughts. The vulnerability of cities to droughts is increasing worldwide. Policy responses from cities to droughts lack consideration of long-term climatic and socio-economic scenarios, and focus on short-term emergency actions that disregard sustainability in the connected regional and river basin systems. We...

In the postulated efforts to limit adverse climate change (CC), increasing attention is paid to the development of distributed renewable energy (RE) that meets the needs of local communities on the spot. This article analyses the objectives, planned actions and performance indicators related to CC and RE, defined by national and local stakeholders...

In a context of political and economic austerity, social innovation has been presented as a solution to many social challenges, old and new. It aims to support the introduction of new ideas in response to the current urgent needs and challenges of vulnerable groups and seems to offer promising solutions to the challenges faced by rural areas. Yet t...

Cross-sectoral partnerships, known as Local Action Groups (LAGs), are a key pillar of the European Union's Community-Led Local Development approach in member states. LAGs prepare bottom-up territorial strategies, having a relatively high degree of freedom to set their own development goals and the scope of the activities for which they receive EU f...

The 2015 Paris Agreement is falling short of its aspirations, as signatory countries are struggling to implement the policies required to meet the targets. The global scenario framework formed by the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) places little emphasis on the dynamics of climate policy imp...

Detecting association between archaeological sites and physical landscape elements like geological deposits, vegetation, drainage networks, or areas of modern disturbance like mines or quarries is a key goal of archaeological projects. This goal is complicated by the incomplete nature of the archaeological record, the high degree of uncertainty of...

Social innovation is a process in which local communities build social and cultural capital to address challenges and social needs. The diffusion of social innovation requires compelling narratives that encourage people to join them. Using qualitative techniques and a multiple case study methodology, this paper examines the content of narratives of...

Current estimates suggest that the world is on track for ~3°C of heating relative to pre-industrial levels by 2100. This is likely to bring great disruption to earth systems, leading to increased natural hazard risks, crop failures, civil unrest and population migration. There is, however, a high degree of uncertainty about the impacts that such ev...

Successful implementation of environmental policies, including climate adaptation and mitigation policies, requires careful consideration of regional and local conditions. Consequently, there is growing understanding that regional models are needed to support climate and environmental policy making. Such models need to take into account the dynamic...

The Actor, Policy and Land Use Simulator (APoLUS), is a free and open-source modelling tool designed to simulate future land use change in the R software environment. APoLUS links spatial cellular automata modelling techniques with actor interactions to produce spatially-explicit land use simulations based on calibrated settings for Neighbourhood (...

Landscapes are changing, with rural areas becoming increasingly urbanized. Children and adolescents are underrepresented in the sense-of-place literature. Our study aimed to understand how adolescent residents of a rural–urban transition area perceive and value their urbanizing landscape by examining sense of place and perceptions of landscape chan...

Significance Achieving a rapid global decarbonization to stabilize the climate critically depends on activating contagious and fast-spreading processes of social and technological change within the next few years. Drawing on expert elicitation, an expert workshop, and a review of literature, which provides a comprehensive analysis on this topic, we...

Cellular Automata (CA) land-use models are widely used for understanding processes of land-use change. However, calibration of these models is a knowledge-intensive and time-consuming process. Although calibration of common driving factors such as accessibility (A), or suitability (S) is a relatively straightforward task, calibrating the neighbourh...

Spatial planning systems at local and regional levels are often not well-adapted to the growth of small-scale and local social innovations in renewable energy. Participatory decision support tools have been developed to support the implementation of many areas of environmental policy, but are less common in energy contexts. In response to this know...

Citizen-driven Renewable Energy (RE) projects of various kinds, known collectively as community energy (CE), have an important part to play in the worldwide transition to cleaner energy systems. On the basis of evidence from 8 European countries, we investigate CE, over approximately the last 50 years (c.1970-2018), through the lens of Social Innov...

In this report we present results of evaluation of 11 Social Innovation Case Studies. The assessments of the Social Innovations were based upon three main blocks. The first step of the evaluation of the social innovation initiative focuses on five evaluation criteria: Relevance, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Impacts and Sustainability (REEIS). This wa...

The article is a product of the COST RELY Action, it is a glossary: definitions related to renewable energy and landscape quality.

SIMLANDER stands for SIMulation of LAnd use changE using R, and is a prototype Cellular Automata (CA) land use model built for the R software environment. The following document provides a description of the model, full user documentation including a step-by-step guide to building a simple land use model. At the end some tips and tricks are provide...

Archaeologists and other fieldworkers frequently record the orientation of artefacts or faunal remains in order to understand depositional and post-depositional processes. However, analysis of this kind of data is complex and not always well-understood by investigators. For example, rose diagrams are commonly used to display orientation data. While...

La implantación de energías renovables es una de las acciones más destacadas que se insertan dentro de las políticas de reducción de gases de efecto invernadero. Este es uno de los factores globales de mayor relevancia de su implantación. Sin embargo, desde la perspectiva territorial y local existen otros factores, como la relación con el paisaje,...

Energy cooperatives, "zero non-renewables" towns and other community initiatives in renewable energy (RE) are emerging across the world, in particular, in Europe and the North America. Such social initiatives vary in size, success rates and implementation strategies. Decentralization consistently appears to be one of the most important characterist...

The purpose of this technical report is to provide an update on work in the Strategic Research Programme (Work package 1.4.3) that is collating maps/spatial datasets on land use and ecosystem services for case study locations of Scotland’s two National Parks and Aberdeenshire River Dee. These maps have been produced through work on agricultural lan...

The investigation and modeling of land use dynamics can be conducted at different scales based on the objective of the study. However, few studies have looked at comparing various scale aspects, such as spatial resolution and the related neighborhood effect, for practical case study applications. In this chapter, we contribute to this under-explore...

Participatory processes are increasingly used for understanding human-environment interaction problems and for developing common strategies for land resource management. These approaches are particularly important in areas where resources are shared by many stakeholders and yet there is no general agreement about how these resources should be manag...

Since ancient times people have been curious to know more about how the future could unfold, and have proposed different scenarios as a tool for exploring the future of their societies. Examples abound, from Plato’s description of his ideal Republic to Orwell’s vision of 1984 in 1948. As a strategic planning tool, scenario techniques originated as...

Land use change is a social-environmental process strongly influenced by the dynamic behaviour of key actors (e.g. land managers, regulators, policy makers). Existing frameworks for modelling land use change tend to under-represent the role of these actors, which makes it difficult to study strongly actor-driven land change processes, like renewabl...

There is increasing demand from stakeholders for tools to support outcomes-based approaches in environmental management. For such tools to be useful, understanding user requirements is key. In Scotland, UK, stakeholders were engaged in the development of an Environmental Decision Support System (EDSS) to support the management of land and freshwate...

Abstract To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, as well as earlier targets set down in the EU Low-Carbon Road Map, requires a major transformation in the way energy is generated, marketed, and distributed that we call the clean energy transition. The clean energy transition is a social process and its success will be determined by the actions of...

Participatory Modelling for Resilient Futures: Action for Managing Our Environment from the Bottom-Up, Volume One provides an important contribution to environmental management by introducing an integrative framework for participatory research for better land use and natural resource planning, organized around compelling recent case studies. It is...

Implementation of any policy involves negotiation between multiple actors, and is therefore susceptible to a dynamic systems modelling approach. In this paper, we make an attempt to develop a family of dynamic systems models of policy implementation in such a multi-actor world by translating an existing, semi-quantitative, application of two theore...

In this paper we show how the dynamic behavior of human actors and their influence on land use change can be modeled to produce spatially explicit simulations of future land use. An actor-based dynamic systems approach is integrated with the existing APoLUS (Actor, Policy and Land Use Simulator) cellular automata land use model. Previous versions o...

This research suggests that the degree of variability in a Cellular Automata (CA) urban land use model application may be linked to the application's suitability for modelling complex urban systems. Although highly stable models may be perceived as desirable, because they produce reliable, realistic-looking land use simulations, there is a risk tha...

This chapter illustrates the practical application of the broad range of tools and approaches described in Chapter 2 to real-world situations. It responds to an important need for well-documented use cases by giving detailed consideration to the specific context of each case study and the way in which tools are used to respond to specific objective...

The interaction of human societies with their environment under a development paradigm that prioritizes economic growth over human and environmental well-being generates serious problems at the planetary scale, like pollution of water, soil, and air, anthropogenic climate change, and the loss of habitats and species. These are not just problems for...

The rising demand of a growing world population for water, food, materials and energy puts increasing pressures on natural resources and ecosystems. Increased energy use has led to an increased demand for land and water. Environmental challenges, along with increased food and feed demands, will further enlarge pressures on land and water resources....

Ante la necesidad de monitorizar los cambios en los usos del suelo (referido a menudo por sus siglas en inglés LUCC) ocurridos en los parques nacionales (PPNN) españoles, como medida para prever tendencias de cambio no deseadas que comprometan la protección del entorno, se presenta un análisis detallado de los LUCC en los parques que conforman la r...

WP3 " realizing climate policy actions " explored acceptance, implementation and realization of climate mitigation policy options at the scale of the landscape from the perspective of those stakeholders who are most important for their successful implementation; policy makers, knowledge gatekeepers and communities. The core of the work related to t...

Translating public policy into effective action across society –which here we call policy implementation - is not at all straightforward, particularly where multiple scales and sectors are involved. In general, implementation is more likely to be successful if a wide range of stakeholders, especially those who are necessary to get the policy workin...

COMPLEX Deliverable 3.7 Policy Briefings: Spain Spain has strong potential to transition to a low carbon economy, primarily through substantially enhancing renewable energy (RE) deployment throughout the country. To achieve this, the following recommendations are provided, according to key themes:

En el siglo XXI nos enfrentamos a cambios sin precedentes en el territorio, la gran mayoría de los cuales son consecuencia de una ordenación territorial que prioriza la obtención de grandes beneficios a corto plazo sobre el mantenimiento de los recursos necesarios para la supervivencia de las especies, la biodiversidad, el agua y el suelo. Además,...

Under the DUSPANAC project 5 simulations were developed showing possible land use configurations for the year 2035 under 5 scenarios for the Doñana natural area (END) and its immediate surroundings. Through a participatory process, stakeholders identified 11 environmental indicators that they considered necessary to support the management and land...

En el siglo XXI nos enfrentamos a cambios sin precedentes en el territorio, la gran mayoría de los cuales son consecuencia de una ordenación territorial que prioriza la obtención de grandes beneficios a corto plazo sobre el mantenimiento de los recursos necesarios para la supervivencia de las especies, la biodiversidad, el agua y el suelo. Además,...

Spatial patterns in urban land development are linked with the level and type of economic activity. Here, we develop a statistical model to explore the relationship between the spatially explicit population density and the type of land use in a region. The relationship between the type of land use (urban/non-urban) and the level of economic activit...

In view of the need to monitor land use changes (often referred to by the English acronym LUCC) that have taken place in Spain’s national parks, as a means of preventing undesirable land change tendencies, a detailed analysis, following Pontius et al. (2004), is presented of LUCC in the national parks that comprise the network. To do this, the well...

Multi-actor integrated assessment models based on well-being concepts beyond GDP could support policymakers by highlighting the interrelation of climate change mitigation and other important societal problems.

In WP3, regional stakeholder groups from two European countries, Spain and the Netherlands, were involved in the development of a land-use decision support model initially known as PLUS4-CMP, renamed APoLUS (Actor, Policy and Land Use Simulator) in June 2014. The purpose of APoLUS is to simulate future land use configurations under different renewa...