Relating land use and global land-cover change

Gaining a better understanding of the ways that land cover and land-use practices are evolving is a priority concern of the global change research community. Being able to project future states of land cover is a requirement for making numerical predictions about other global changes. The plant outlined in this report by working groups calls for the development of a system to classify land-cover changes according to their socio-economic driving forces. The remainder of this report defines the research problem and lays out a plan that addresses the human causes of global land-cover change. This plan includes the development of a global land-cover and land-use model that can link to other global models central to the study of global environmental change. The report reviews the importance of modification and conversion of land cover to the functioning of the Earth system. It then discusses the relationship between human uses of the land and changes in land cover; reviews what is known about the human forces that determine land use; and proposes a conceptual system for relating these driving forces to changes in land cover. The complexity of the relationships between the human driving forces of land use and land cover is illustrated by briefly reviewing the results of a recent case study of the causes and consequences of land-cover changes in Amazonia. The last section of the report describes the three foci which provide the basic structure for the proposed programme of research. -from Editors