Drivers of Human Stress on the Environment in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Human actions are transforming ecosystems across the globe. Six frameworks aid in understanding the forces that drive human stress on the environment and human responses to this stress. Two of them, the stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence and technology (STIRPAT) model and decomposition analysis, are approaches to analyzing data. Four describe the interrelated system of human actions and environmental responses: driving forces, pressures, states, impacts, responses (DPSIR); the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) framework; coupled human and natural systems (CHANS) and telecoupling; and social-ecological systems (SES). In applying these frameworks, attention must be given to the scale of analysis and to the effects of context. In addition to the frameworks there are four substantial research literatures providing theory and empirical analysis of how drivers place stress on the environment: a macrocomparative tradition, work on household energy consumption, land change science, and research on commons. Although these traditions remain somewhat separate, they are largely complementary.