Global Environmental Change And Land Use

The interaction between environmental change and human activities is com plex, requiring the concepts and tools of a number of disciplines for its effective analysis. Land-use and land-cover change has only recently become a topic susceptible to scientific research, as these concepts and tools have been devel oped and made available. Rooted in a broad community concemed with global change, systematic research has begun into land-use systems at different scales and interactions, and their links with global cyc1es of water, nitrogen and carbon are being explored. Partly based on research initiated by the Dutch National Research Programme on Global Air PolIution and Climate Change (NRP), this book touches upon various land-use and land-cover issues in relation to global environmental change. In addition to the biogeochemical cyc1es, land as a car rier for functions of economic activities, food and fibre production and energy production via biomass are discussed. Crucial in studying land use is human behaviour and man-environment interaction at different scales. Land-use and land-cover change is an important contrlbutor of greenhouse gasses as these activities directly interfere with the carbon, nitrogen and water cyc1es. These cyc1es are connected through numerous feedback loops. The interface of land-use and c1imate is essentially determined by the interaction of man and the environment. Man uses land primarily to produce food; a relatively small area is needed for urban development.

This book presents recent estimates on the rate of change of major land classes. Aggregated globally, multiple impacts of local land changes are shown to significantly affect central aspects of Earth System functioning. The book offers innovative developments and applications in the fields of modeling and scenario construction. Conclusions are also drawn about the most pressing implications for the design of appropriate intervention policies.

Climate and Land Use Impacts on Natural and Artificial Systems: Mitigation and Adaptation provides in-depth information on the linkages between climate change and land use, how they are related, how land use is shifting over time, and the major global regions at risk for climate and land use changes. This comprehensive resource discusses climatic factors and processes that impact natural and artificial systems, as well as the relationship between climate change and both natural and man-made hazards. The book includes case studies and original maps to provide real-life examples of climate change and land use over regions around the globe. In addition, the book presents future perspectives on mitigation and adaptation of the climate change impact. Summarizes current research on land use and climate change Provides future perspectives on climate change using climate models Includes case studies to provide real-life examples from various countries Incorporates high level graphics, images, and maps to support reviews and case studies

Property Rights and Climate Change explores the multifarious relationships between different types of climate-driven environmental changes and property rights. This original contribution to the literature examines such climate changes through the lens of property rights, rather than through the lens of land use planning. The inherent assumption pursued is that the different types of environmental changes, with their particular effects and impact on land use, share common issues regarding the relation between the social construction of land via property rights and the dynamics of a changing environment. Making these common issues explicit and discussing the different approaches to them is the central objective of this book. Through examining a variety of cases from the Arctic to the Australian coast, the contributors take a transdisciplinary look at the winners and losers of climate change, discuss approaches to dealing with changing environmental conditions, and stimulate pathways for further research. This book is essential reading for lawyers, planners, property rights experts and environmentalists.

This publication is extracted from a much larger report, Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade, which addresses the full range of the scientific issues concerning global environmental change and offers guidance to the scientific effort on these issues in the United States. This volume consists of Chapter 7 of that report, "Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change," which was written for the report by the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change of the National Research Council (NRC). It provides findings and conclusions on the key scientific questions in human dimensions research, the lessons that have been learned over the past decade, and the research imperatives for global change research funded from the United States.

Land has long been overlooked in economics. That is now changing. A substantial part of the solution to the climate crisis may lie in growing crops for fuel and using trees for storing carbon. This book investigates the potential of these options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, estimates the costs to the economy, and analyses the trade-offs with growing food. The first part presents new databases that are necessary to underpin policy-relevant research in the field of climate change while describing and critically assessing the underlying data, the methodologies used, and the first applications. Together, the new data and the extended models allow for a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a land use and climate policy. This book outlines key empirical and analytical issues associated with modelling land use and land use change in the context of global climate change policy. It places special emphasis on the economy-wide competition for land and other resources, especially; The implications of changes in land use for the cost of climate change mitigation, Land use change as a result of mitigation, and Feedback from changes in the global climate to land use. By offering synthesis and evaluation of a variety of different approaches to this challenging field of research, this book will serve as a key reference for future work in the economic analysis of land use and climate change policy.

This publication is extracted from a much larger report, Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade, which addresses the full range of the scientific issues concerning global environmental change and offers guidance to the scientific effort on these issues in the United States. This volume consists of Chapter 7 of that report, "Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change," which was written for the report by the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change of the National Research Council (NRC). It provides findings and conclusions on the key scientific questions in human dimensions research, the lessons that have been learned over the past decade, and the research imperatives for global change research funded from the United States.

During recent past, large scale conversions of forests to other land-uses in developed and developing countries in response to high population growth has been observed. As a consequence, this has disrupted the hydrological cycle and a great change in climate is envisaged. The land-use change from forest to the other usage has been quite conspicuous in the last few decades in the Indian Himalayan region. Land-use/cover change is emerging as a central issue within the community concerned with global environment. This concern is driven by the contributions that land-use/cover transformations make a wide variety of changes. The recent interest in land-use change has generated effort to understand the inter-relationship between land-use/cover and climate change. Most of the global environmental problems fall within the gambit of land-use/cover change and require a thorough understanding of its causes and consequences. Understanding of land-use/cover and climate change is important for the sustainable development and to evolve strategies for the mitigation of climate change at local, regional and global levels. This work is basically designed to familiarise the graduate, post-graduate and research students with the basic knowledge of land-use/cover and its impact on climate.