2010-2016, Wellington, Auckland, New Zealand Commissioned by FRST (Foundation for Research, Science and Technology) Contact: Hedwig van Delden

New Zealand’s regions face the challenge of becoming more sustainable, being internationally competitive and providing high quality of life for the 86% of New Zealanders that choose to live in urban areas. These ideals will not be achieved with a laissez faire approach. Instead, planners need to actively envisage and define pathways to achieve these aspirations.

The aim of the Sustainable Pathways 2 project is to develop an integrative scenario modeling capacity for planners and communities in New Zealand, which illuminates and links the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. For this aim, the project includes three objectives: mediated modeling, spatial dynamic modeling, and the embedding of scenario modeling into the urban planning practice. RIKS will contribute to the second and third objective by developing a hybrid land-use change model that brings together cellular automata land use modeling, agent based modeling and ecological economics. While linking these modelling approaches we will build on the work from the Creating Futures project. This modeling approach will be applied to the Auckland region and the Wellington region, as both cities are expected to face a rapid increase in urban population in the near future. The project is a collaborative effort of a consoortium of partners, led by the Ecological Economics Research centre New Zealand (EERNZ). More information about this project can be found on the project website.