Land Use and Cover Change Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Land Use and Cover Change Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

The term l an d use refers to the purpose to which land is put-for example, agriculture, industry, urban, or untouched. Land cover refers to the observable physical or biophysical cover of the earth’s surface such as forest, sea, or desert. Clearly, there are direct relationships between many aspects of the land cover and the use to which land is put.

In general terms, the type of land cover that exists influences the type of land use that is possible: the presence of forested areas limits agriculture, while rivers and waterways promote fishing and irrigation. Since the interaction between land use and land cover does not always appear to be convenient for human settlement, the land cover can be changed to what appears to be a more profitable form of land use. This has happened extensively over the past thousand years: the virgin forests of Southeast Asia have become irrigated rice fields and rubber plantations; the Great Plains region of the United States has become in many parts intensively farmed. These changes in land cover have had many impacts on climate change, along with other effects on the environment. While these changes have been occurring over an extensive period of time and are in some cases caused by naturally occurring phenomena, such as volcanoes and earthquakes, it is undeniably true that changes intensified in the 20th century and are set to do so even more in the future.

Land use and cover change (LUCC) may be complex and the underlying causes may be difficult to identify. Causes may also be quite obvious: for example, the intensification of agriculture in many parts of western China has involved the unsustainable use of water resources. This has led to the desertification of much of the land. This desertification has impoverished the local people pursuing agricultural activities, made traditional herding very difficult, and caused sandstorms in which cities such as the capital, Beijing, can be subject to intense bombardment by particles whipped up by winds in the desertified areas. In Thailand the intensive logging of teak forests and other valuable woods has all but removed the once dominant land cover and left the land increasingly subject to flooding and mud slippage. This phenomenon is also evident in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

The large-scale deforestation of the Amazon River region has led to significant reductions in the ability of the earth’s land cover to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and has contributed to global warming. Other impacts include the loss of habitable land and attendant land conflict, and increases in poverty and negative health outcomes. These effects tend to cause land cover change to accelerate, as the remaining resources of the land are acquired as rapidly as possible before disappearing completely.

When the land is subject to additional pressure resulting from population increases or from the desire for commercial exploitation, then the land use change can be further intensified. Peasants-the poor land-users-will use whatever forms or combinations of land use that will minimize risk and provide a regular income in the foreseeable future. This tends to mean that, freed from external influences, the poor find methods of land use that are generally sustainable. However, when external influences are brought into play, perhaps because of central government advice for a more productive set of practices or through large-scale extraction of resources, then the local wisdom is generally discarded and the land use change becomes unsustainable.

The use of dams has also caused considerable changes in land use both through the act of their creation and in downstream regions. The world’s largest dam, the Three Gorges Dam in China, has involved the creation of a reservoir stretching more than 600 kilometers upstream and has seen the relocation of more than 1.25 million people. Hundreds of villages and even small cities have been dismantled and rebuilt or just abandoned and the traditional lifestyles of all those affected have been changed, often radically.

Downstream effects have included changes in the migratory patterns of fish and, hence, ability to catch those fish, as well as the restricting of water flows which, together with industrial extraction of water from rivers has meant that many large waterways now frequently fail to reach the sea. Clearly, this has considerable impact on the ability of people to pursue long-standing agricultural activities in the downstream regions. Rapidly growing urban areas are also forced to maintain public health services in the absence of accustomed water resources. A lack of interest in the welfare of the displaced is also evident in the projected dam building projects on the Salween River in Burma and to various extents in projects around the world.

Data Collecting Projects

In recent years, international cooperative scientific efforts have sought to establish data collecting projects to document LUCC and to study the implications of changes around the world. For example, a Land Use and Cover Change Project was a Programme Element of the International Geosphere – Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), based in Belgium. Its primary objective was “to obtain a better understanding of global land use and land cover driving forces; to investigate and document temporal and geographical dynamics of land use and land cover; to define the links between sustainability and various land uses and to understand the interrelationship between LUCC, biogeochemistry and climate.” This resulted in a series of investigative projects aimed at integrating comparative case studies, diagnostic and empirical observations, and analyses at different geographical levels. Projects like these have gathered baseline information about the nature of LUCC around the world. However, much remains to be done before it is possible to accurately predict implications of future changes.

Government Responses

Responses to LUCC at the governmental level have taken place at both national and international levels. At the national level, governments have considered zoning systems and schemes to encourage sustainable land use, although these have not always been well-planned or executed. At the international level, some agreements have been made to deal with specific phenomena such as acid rain or with respect to damming of rivers but, in general, these have proved to be very difficult to establish in practice.

Bibliography:

Leiwen Jiang et , “Water Resources, Land Exploration and Population Dynamics in Arid Areas-The Case of the Tarim River Basin in Xinjiang of China,” Population and Environment (v.26/6, 2005);
Eric F. Lambin and Helmut J. Geist, , Land-Use and Land-Cover Change: Local Processes and Global Impacts (Springer, 2006);
A.M. Mannion, Dynamic World: Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (Hodder Arnold, 2002);
Stephen Perz, Carlos Aramburi, and Jason Bremner, “Population, Land Use and Deforestation in the Pan Amazon Basin: A Comparison of Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peri and Venezuela,” Environment, Development and Sustainability (v.7, 2005);
James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 1976);
Makoto Taniguchi, , Subsurface Hydrological Responses to Land Cover and Land Use Changes (Springer, 1997).