Sustainability impact assessment of land use changes in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The chapter deals with sustainable land use in the Anthropocene. We present a framework for sustainability impact assessment (SIA), which is a tool to support political decision-making concerning sustainable human space usage. The debate on the Anthropocene calls for social science approaches for an integrative and spatially explicit SIA of land use changes. It influences scientific approaches to the SIA of land use changes due to increasing evidence that planetary boundaries are being exceeded by humankind and that societal value systems are changing. We argue that, in order to correctly identify land use claims, SIA approaches are required that include a representation of humankind as a major geological driver of land use changes. In future SIA research, anthropogenic land use claims and patterns should be linked with the boundaries of bio-geophysical thresholds of the Earth system. This will help to integrate the knowledge base on sustainability gains and deficits of land use changes when addressing issues of global governance.