Land Use & land cover change processes occurs at the interface between human and environmental systems interacting with both of these systems and with each other by feedback. However, there are other systems involved in these interactions to include natural and socioeconomic changes. As such land management decisions must have a balance between optimizing the various opportunities and the challenges imposed by various external factors. This proves that land-use and landscape change processes are complex and in order to cope with these complexities human must be able to identify ways in which the causes interact. Some of these causes have been observed globally and include but not limited to the following:
• Conditions that impede …show more content…
However, the currents rates as the result of urbanization, food security and population growth has extended the intensities of land use and landscape change far greater than ever. This rate is unprecedented changes in the ecosystems and environmental processes at local, regional and global scales, therefore a general term for such human modifications of the Earth’s terrestrial surface is known as Land-use and land-cover change (LULCC); also know as land change(Bonan, 2010). These changes have had some negative consequences such as climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution of water and air and soils degradation that are of serious concerns to the human populations …show more content…
The “Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, fisheries and Forests”, of the FAO.
Land is critical for sustainable economic development and land governance must be considered within a global concept of transparency, accountability. Land governance has to be participatory and protect the rights of the poor and other vulnerable groups ie, women and minorities.
Main Causes of Land-Use Change
Multiple interacting factors are always the driving forces of land-use change. These vary in time and space depending on specific human-environmental conditions. Phenomenal such as droughts induced by climate change or loss of soil fertility by erosion could be important as human drivers and include legal framework and policy. Land use changes may also be driven by or trigger by events be it biophysical as in drought or hurricane or socioeconomic as in war or economic crisis. These interactions have impositions on the some causes of Land use change.
Natural Variability: This is when natural environmental changes interact with the human decision making processes that cause land-use change. This could be that when farmland expands to dry lands it may increase the vulnerability of human-environment system thereby triggering land