Global Consequences of Land Use
Tóm tắt
Land use has generally been considered a local environmental issue, but it is becoming a force of global importance. Worldwide changes to forests, farmlands, waterways, and air are being driven by the need to provide food, fiber, water, and shelter to more than six billion people. Global croplands, pastures, plantations, and urban areas have expanded in recent decades, accompanied by large increases in energy, water, and fertilizer consumption, along with considerable losses of biodiversity. Such changes in land use have enabled humans to appropriate an increasing share of the planet's resources, but they also potentially undermine the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, maintain freshwater and forest resources, regulate climate and air quality, and ameliorate infectious diseases. We face the challenge of managing trade-offs between immediate human needs and maintaining the capacity of the biosphere to provide goods and services in the long term.
Từ khóa
Tài liệu tham khảo
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We acknowledge the important contributions of both the American Geophysical Union Chapman Conference on Ecosystems and Land Use Change and the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in spurring these ideas. We also wish to thank S. Donner D. Foley and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We are grateful to M. Sternitzky and N. Olejniczak for the maps and illustrations and to K. Flick and C. Webb for help with the references. The authors declare that they have no competing financial interests.