Dear Researcher,
It is well-establshed fact that the link between land use and the climate is complex. For example, land cover, as shaped by land-use practices, affects the global concentration of greenhouse gases. While land-use change is an important driver of climate change, as changing climate can lead to changes in land use and land cover. Although, the understanding of the interactions between climate and land-use change is improving, continued scientific investigation is still needed. I request you to kindly share your opinions and evidence from the published research regarding various methods available that help distinguishes and decide whether the disaster occurred due to climate change or land cover change. Thank you!
Yours Sincerely,
Aman Srivastava
Some of the land use changes are fairly well documented in the body of experimental watershed research, such as converting forest to farm land; reading, clear cutting and hot burning effects on unstable lands; the effects of urbanization, installing dams and other hydrological modifications. Land use changes are fairly easy to document through reviewing aerial photos, evaluating field or site conditions, looking for changes in vegetation, roads or equipment use, in-stream mining or dredging, and sometimes even animal traffic might contribute to a certain disaster as bank failure. The connectivity of the land use change, such as an agricultural terrace failure with a gully or a severe wildfire with a landslide in unstable terrain during a storm is easier to make.
Climate change is more difficult to document or prove, and to some degree requires the connection of atmospheric, oceanic, meteorologic, and connect them with the available rainfall, streamflow, flood, sea levels, glacial expansion or contraction. Our records tend to be decades or maybe even a few centuries, with a few exceptions such as ice cores, tree rings, various geological or geomorphological study of prehistoric landforms, marine terraces, etc.
And there may be instances of overlap, when both land use and climate change influences combine and contribute to disturbances that contribute to disasters. If the disaster occurs and cannot be connected to some form of climate change as severe rainfall, wind, drought or other related climate extreme, it’s probably best to consider either land use or some other form of disturbance, such as insects, disease, earthquake, animal damage or traffic, etc.
Our tools to identify both climate extremes such as with Doppler and land conditions such as LiDAR and high definition aerial photos have increased tremendously in recent years. For some disasters, connecting the contributors may be obvious, for some it may be difficult with the evidence to assign either.
You may read some sources done in this topic about Minnesota River Basin. Last few decade, there was a a big debate about this issue and many papers have been published to see the impact of climate change and land use/ land cover change on flow regime of Minnesota River. Some of them already recognize the dominant factor.
When the concentration of CO2 in the air has increased steadily to about double what it was before industrialization it is obvious that changes will come about in the weather which depends on the gases in the air. I think land use changes have contributed, but not to a large extent.
Land use change of arid/desert to irrigated cropland is a primary driver of climate change. http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com
In recent time, climate change has played a significant role in disaster, however, climate change agreviates disasters rather than cause them. Land use\land cover on the other hand has been scientifically proven to contribute to disasters
It has been scientifically proven that the misuse of land use/land cover contributes to climate change, which plays an important role in disasters.
I think this reference will be helpful,
Solar, R. 2014. Building Climate Resilience: A Training Manual for Community Based Climate Change Adaptation. Regional Climate Change Adaptation Knowledge Platform for Asia, Partner Report Series No. 14. Regional Resource Centre for Asia and the Pacific (RRC.AP), Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. Available at www.asiapacificadapt.net or www.learninginstitute.org.
Such research processes should take into account both the analysis of climate change and the analysis of geographical and natural determinants shaping the possibilities and scale of occurrence of a specific type of natural disasters, climate catastrophes and weather anomalies. On the other hand, research processes should also take into account the issue of the uniqueness of a specific area in terms of the conditions of the climatic zone, topography, weather and climatic factors, the specificity of local natural environments and natural ecosystems. The results of the research conducted in this way should be taken into account in improving the crisis management process and managing the risk of potential occurrence of certain types of natural, climatic and natural disasters.
Best regards,
Dariusz Prokopowicz
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