-Caveat Lector-
Yahoo News
Land Database Reveals Human-Induced Changes to Earth
AMSTERDAM, August 1, 2001 - Scientists have long said that humans are
changing the Earth's landscape at a rapid rate but for the first time,
concrete evidence shows just how much, prompting one of the researchers to
say "We're hitting a threshold of available global natural resources." This
is the warning of University of Wisconsin-Madison environmental scientist
Navin Ramankutty, who along with Kees Klein Goldewijk, of the Dutch
National Institute of Public Health in Amsterdam, has chronicled the impact
humans have made on the Earth's landscape over the past 300 years.
Addressing attendees at a recently held open science conference held under
the auspices of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, the
researchers say this issue must be addressed now, before it is too late,
since "there is no substitute for natural resources."
According to the scientists, agriculture is the biggest user of land, with
about 12 percent of the entire terrestrial surface used for this purpose.
This amounts to the entire surface area of South America. However, fast on
the heels of agriculture is urbanization says Ramankutty.
"Historically, we lost forest to crop land. Now we are losing crop land to
urban areas," he says.
To arrive at their conclusions, the researchers combined records such as
agricultural land surveys, tax rolls and census data, and satellite
imagery. Ramankutty says the database that emerged from this convergence of
information provides a comprehensive picture of the growing dominance of
human land use on global land-cover patterns. Data sets, he notes, could be
used within global climate models and global ecosystem models to gain
insight into the influence of land cover change on climate and biological
and geochemical cycles.
A few of the notable points brought out by the researchers include:
Half of the world's supply of fresh water is now appropriated by humans; Si
nce 1700, nearly 20 percent of the world's forests and woodlands have
disappeared; and
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by nearly a third
since the industrial revolution.
This trend will only continue as the global population continues to grow
along with the per capita consumption of goods and services derived from
natural resources. Moreover, in some parts of the world intensive
agriculture is exhausting the land, permanently removing acreage from
production and the natural resource base.
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