The representation of human-environment interactions in land change research and modelling

Abstract

Land change is the result of multiple human-environment interactions operating across different scales. Land change research needs to account for processes ranging from global trade of food and energy to the local management of land resources at farm and landscape level. Land change has a pronounced impact on the local and global environment. Land change may cause degradation of the living environment through soil degradation or changes in the aesthetic qualities of the landscape. At the same time, land change may lead to aggregate impacts on larger spatial and temporal scales, examples include the impacts on global climate and food security. Such impacts affect human well-being and often feedback on land use practices and decision making by adapting to the changing environmental and socio-economic context. Human-environment interactions in the land system are, therefore, connected across scales with multiple feedbacks, leading to so-called 'teleconnections' or 'telecoupling' in the earth system. The same process may cause different trajectories of land change in different world regions: globalization of food production can cause deforestation in tropical regions while marginal agricultural landscapes in other regions are abandoned. The local environmental and socio-economic context determines how the same global changes lead to different trajectories of land change in different parts of the world.