What is Land Use and How Does it Impact Climate Change?
In the fight against climate change, deforestation is often one element that comes to the forefront. However, it is just one part of an even larger issue facing our planet: changing land use. Whether it’s cutting down a forest to make room for agriculture, urban sprawl turning grassland into concrete, or even replanting trees to turn that land back into a forest, humanity has continually shaped and reshaped the land around us.
This reshaping of our environment has both positive and negative effects on our climate. It’s problems like this that put even more importance on protecting the untouched land we have and keeping it that way, like how ReWorld and Proyecto Titi work to preserve the forests of Colombia.
Defining Land Use
In this context, land use refers to the way that humans use land — whether it be for a city, agriculture, or infrastructure. When it comes to our climate, what is most important is how our actions affect land cover. Land cover is the kind of physical things on the land, such as trees or concrete. It’s these things — and how humanity changes them — that impacts the environment.
Turning a lush forest into a parking lot obviously decreases the amount of carbon that patch of land can capture from the atmosphere, for example. In contrast, reforestation and afforestation improves carbon capture.
Large Scale Changes
The extent to which humans have shaped and changed the way our land is used has been substantial. According to a paper published in Nature Communications, almost one third of the world’s global land surface has been changed between 1960 and 2019 — an area equivalent to twice the area of Germany (720,000 km2) every year.
This includes a 0.8 million km2 global net loss in forest area and an increase in global land used for agriculture of 1.9 million km2. Overall, in the past millennia, three quarters of the earth’s land has been altered by humans.
Effects Of and By Climate Change
It is these changes to our land that are one of the main drivers of climate change. According to a 2018 UN report, 10% of human-induced greenhouse gasses (GHG) were created by deforestation alone. Additionally, 4.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions were released each year from degraded land between 2000 and 2009.
About 23% of all GHG emissions are due to agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. This is in addition to 44% of methane emissions specifically coming from agriculture, peatland destruction, and other earthly sources. However, while the way we have shaped land produces a large amount of emissions, it still acts as one of the largest and most effective carbon sinks on earth. In fact, it even acts as a net carbon sink, soaking up six gigatons of carbon per year from 2007 to 2016.
While the fact that our land can still act as a carbon sink is encouraging, the increasing scale of climate change is negatively affecting land cover. It’s even happening in places where humans are not changing how it is used. We see the impact in longer droughts, intense rainstorms, landslides, and tropical storms. These occurrences are ripping up or drying out trees, degrading the soil of many areas in the world and decreasing the amount of carbon it can absorb.
Given all of this, it’s no wonder that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that “since the pre-industrial period, the land surface air temperature has risen nearly twice as much as the global average temperature (high confidence).”
If we do not start working right now to mitigate the effects of climate change, the effects on our land will continue to snowball. Poor treatment of the land creates more negatively impacting climate changes, which degrade the land further, and so on. By returning land to its natural state, we can fight climate change and protect our planet and the many species that inhabit it.
How You Can Help
Fortunately, there are ways that we can change our land use for the better and help fight climate change. Reforestation is one of the most prominent ways, though we need to be sure that we are planting the right trees in the right places to avoid doing more harm to the local environment. We can also protect the wild land we have, like ReWorld and Proyecto Titi in the Colombian forests.
Another tool in our arsenal is using more sustainable land management practices like crop rotation and more efficient watering. We can help protect our land and natural resources while also producing the food we need to live. One last strategy starts with us. If we alter our habits and shift to more plant-based diets we can help reduce the demand for more destructive land uses and help keep warming below dangerous levels.