Visualizing Relationships between Drivers of Environmental Change and Pressures on Land-Based Ecosystems

Jason Jabbour,Carol Hunsberger

doi:10.4236/nr.2014.54015

Jason Jabbour, Carol Hunsberger

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.4236/nr.2014.54015

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Abstract

The pursuit of human needs and demands is placing more pressure on land resources than ever before. The challenge of feeding 7 billion people is increasingly competing with rising demands for materials and biofuels. Deforestation and land degradation are among the pressing outcomes of these trends. Drivers of environmental change—including population growth, economic activity, consumption, urbanization, trade, conflict, and governance—clearly play a role in aggravating or mitigating these pressures on land. Despite advances in understanding causality in complex systems, navigating the interactions between these drivers remains a major challenge. This paper analyzes and visualizes the relationships between multiple, interacting drivers of environmental change and specific pressures on land-based ecosystems. Drawing on experience from the development of the Drivers and Land chapters of the UN Environment Programme’s Fifth Global Environment Outlook report (GEO-5), we use a series of Kiviat diagrams to illustrate the relative influence of key drivers on selected pressures on land. When individual diagrams are overlaid, patterns of influence emerge that can provide insight into where policy responses might best be targeted. We propose that, subject to some limitations, the Kiviat exercise can provide an accessible and potentially valuable “knowledge-intermediary” tool to help link science-based information to policy action.

Highlights

Human activities are intensifying stresses on the Earth System—and producing biophysical surprises
We present the results of our analysis and discusses the insights it contributes to the three tasks identified in Section 1: identifying patterns of interaction between drivers and pressures for specific forms of environmental change related to land; assessing the strengths and limitations of the Kiviat technique for this type of analysis; and commenting on the role that this tool can play in supporting integrated environmental assessments
In the first Kiviat diagram (Figure 3) we consider three land pressures related to forests that are featured in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO)-5 Land chapter: the expansion of large-scale oil palm plantations; commercial timber extraction—both regulated and unregulated—for wood and pulpwood products; and the production of traditional biomass

Summary

Introduction

Human activities are intensifying stresses on the Earth System—and producing biophysical surprises. The Amazon basin provides emerging evidence of a terrestrial ecosystem experiencing such a biophysical transition, due largely to human influence. Near-surface permafrost represents another system potentially undergoing a major shift: permafrost temperatures across the Arctic have increased by about 2 ̊C over the past 20 - 30 years [5], and climate projections indicate a substantial and irreversible loss of up to 85% to 90% of near-surface permafrost by 2100 [6] [7]. Such rapid thawing would increase atmospheric CO2 concentrations, amplify surface warming and initiate a positive carbon feedback that could lead to a directional change in the carbon balance for the Arctic (from a sink to a source) as early as the mid-2020s; nullifying up to 88% of the total global land sink [8]

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