Land use

[2]: 2914 Land-use change, together with use of fossil fuels, are the major anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide, a dominant greenhouse gas.

[19] The reshaping of landscapes to serve human needs, such as the deforestation for farmland, can have long-term effects on earth systems and exacerbate the causes of climate change.

[20] Although the burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of present-day climate change, prior to the Industrial Revolution, deforestation and irrigation were the largest sources of human-driven greenhouse gas emissions.

[20] Increasing land conversion by humans in future is not inevitable: In a discussion on response options to climate change mitigation and adaptation an IPCC special report stated that "a number of response options such as increased food productivity, dietary choices and food losses, and waste reduction, can reduce demand for land conversion, thereby potentially freeing land and creating opportunities for enhanced implementation of other response options".

[25] Studying risk and vulnerability entails the development of quantitative, qualitative, and geospatial models, methods, and support tools.

[26] The purpose of these tools is to communicate the vulnerability of both human communities and natural ecosystems to hazard events or long-term land change.

Modeling risk and vulnerability requires analyses of community sensitivity to hazards, an understanding of geographic distributions of people and infrastructure, and accurate calculation of the probability of specific disturbances occurring.

LCMs are a means of understanding ways that humans change the Earth's surface in the past, present, and future.

[10] Forests are a vital part of the global ecosystem and are essential to carbon capture, ecological processes, and biodiversity.

[30] Rather, deforestation is the result of intertwining systemic forces working simultaneously or sequentially to change land cover.

[32] This leads to the overexploitation of farmland, and down the line results in desertification, another land cover change, which renders soil unusable and unprofitable, requiring farmers to seek out untouched and unpopulated old-growth forests.

[32] In addition to rural migration and subsistence farming, economic development can also play a substantial role in deforestation.

[30] For example, road and railway expansions designed to increase quality of life have resulted in significant deforestation in the Amazon and Central America.

[33] According to the United Nations, the global urban population has increased rapidly since 1950, from 751 million to 4.2 billion in 2018, and current trends predict this number will continue to grow.

[39] However, a water diversion project, undertaken by the Soviet Union to irrigate arid plains in what is now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, resulted in the Aral Sea losing 85% of its land cover and 90% of its volume.

[38][39] Additionally, scientists have been able to use technology such as NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to track changes to the Aral Sea and its surrounding climate over time.

As society shifted from rural to urban, public land regulation became important, especially to city governments trying to control industry, commerce, and housing within their boundaries.

Judicial decisions and enforcement of private land-use arrangements can reinforce public regulation, and achieve forms and levels of control that regulatory zoning cannot.

There is growing concern that land use regulation is a direct cause of housing segregation in the United States today.