Land-use and land-cover changes have many layers that are all worth diving deeper into. One that really stuck out to me was the land-atmosphere processes as well as the connection to biodiversity. Agriculture is one of the biggest components of gases being leaked into the atmosphere. As we intensify areas of land we are release more N20 and CH4 then would normally be released if the area of land had been kept in its original form. Verburg et. al states that these this release from agriculture is produced by “N2O from fertilizer application (Zaehle et al., 2011), or CH4 from cattle and rice production  (Verburg, 34). Not only that but when converting areas of land for Agriculture, large forests are often cut down which further affect our CO2 emissions as forests are carbon sinks. I think this issue is only recently coming to the surface because the idea of food shortages because of extreme weathers, such as droughts or torrential rain, have overshadowed it.

While food shortages as a negative effect of climate change is very  real, it becomes an endless cycle as we convert more land for agriculture we put out more CO2 causing more extreme weather and therefore more food shortages. I think it is extremely imperative we efficiently use our agriculture land use as well as preserve our forests in order to mitigate this endless cycle. In the land atmosphere process Verburg states, Finding ways to synthesize available data and knowledge in these communities will allow further development of the mechanisms represented in models, advance our capacity to evaluate model performance, and yield information to support policy development and societies towards successful adaptation and mitigation strategies”  (Verburg, 35). This idea of working together, or telecoupling*, is a key component to the endless cycle of the land-atmosphere process I mentioned above. If we are able to give information that support policy development, we can become more efficient in our agricultural processes and preserve other land not only to help biodiversity but to also eliminate more CO2 emissions.

*Telecoupling- “Tele” meaning, distance, “Coupling” meaning, bringing things together. Represents the interconnected nature of our world and our connected network with everywhere around the world.

Sources:

Verburg, Peter H., Neville Crossman, Erle C. Ellis, Andreas Heinimann, Patrick Hostert, Ole Mertz, Harini Nagendra, et al. “Land System Science and Sustainable Development of the Earth System: A Global Land Project Perspective.” Anthropocene 12 (December 1, 2015): 29–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2015.09.004.