Complex trade-offs across co-designed narratives of Australian land-system futures

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Reconciling food production, economic prosperity, climate mitigation and biodiversity recovery is a defining challenge for land systems, yet narratives and integrated models are usually developed separately, limiting evaluation of stakeholder-defined futures. Here we translate four co-designed Ag2050 futures into a national-scale land-system optimisation model for Australia. Their desirability depends on how competing objectives are weighed. Landscape Stewardship delivers the largest biodiversity gain (to 97.9 Mha) and the only net carbon sink (−73.7 Mt CO₂e yr⁻¹) by reallocating 13.9 Mha to environmental and multifunctional uses, while achieving returns of AU$40.7 billion yr⁻¹. Regional Ag Capitals maximises food output (240.4 Mt yr⁻¹) and returns (AU$43.4 billion yr⁻¹) but holds net emissions well above a net-zero trajectory. By translating co-designed narratives into a shared framework, our approach makes trade-offs explicit, supports iterative refinement of stakeholder-defined futures, and offers a transferable basis for evaluating national land-use pathways against global climate, biodiversity and food-security goals.</p>