Global Land Uses - Changes, Consequences & Challenges

Human driven changes to the land surface have wide ranging influence on the functioning of the Earth System. The intensity of land cover change has increased rapidly over the last three hundred years, driven by population growth and increasing living standards. Expansion of agriculture and deforestation has significantly altered the environment. Recent development in land cover data sources enables us to obtain a reasonable overview of the global changes in land cover. Much less, however, is known about change in land use practices and agricultural and forest management that impact ecological services. In this lecture Professor Reenberg outlines the complexity of causes, processes and impacts of land change and call for a comprehensive framework to understand the human decisions that drive the global changes.