Land Use and Climate Change

During recent past, large scale conversions of forests to other land-uses in developed and developing countries in response to high population growth has been observed. As a consequence, this has disrupted the hydrological cycle and a great change in climate is envisaged. The land-use change from forest to the other usage has been quite conspicuous in the last few decades in the Indian Himalayan region. Land-use/cover change is emerging as a central issue within the community concerned with global environment. This concern is driven by the contributions that land-use/cover transformations make a wide variety of changes. The recent interest in land-use change has generated effort to understand the inter-relationship between land-use/cover and climate change. Most of the global environmental problems fall within the gambit of land-use/cover change and require a thorough understanding of its causes and consequences. Understanding of land-use/cover and climate change is important for the sustainable development and to evolve strategies for the mitigation of climate change at local, regional and global levels. This work is basically designed to familiarise the graduate, post-graduate and research students with the basic knowledge of land-use/cover and its impact on climate.