The purpose of this study is to explore the potential impacts of pesticide use and inter-row management of European winegrowers in response to policy designs and climate change. Pesticides considered in this study include insecticides, pheromone dispensers (as an alternative to insecticides), fungicides (both the synthetic type and copper-sulphur based). Inter-row management concerns the arrangement of vegetation in the inter-rows and the type of vegetation.

The purpose of this spatially-explicit agent-based model is to intervene in the debate about PES policy design, implementation and context. We use the case for a woodland-for-water payment for ecosystem services (PES) and model its implementation in a local area of Catalonia (NE Spain). The model is based on three sub-models. The structural contains four different designs of a PES policy. The social sub-model includes agent-based factors, by having four types of landowner categories managing or not the forests. This sub-model is based on behavioral studies and assumptions about reception and reaction to incentive policies from European-focused studies. The ecological sub-model is based on climate change data for the area. The output are the evolution of the ecological and social goals of the policy under different policy design scenarios. Our focus in Europe surges from the general context of land abandonment that many Mediterranean areas and Eastern countries are experiencing, and the growing interest from policy-makers and practitioners on the implementation of PES schemes to ameliorate this situation.

This simulation model is to simulate the emergence of technological innovation processes from the hypercycles perspective.