Methodologies to assess human-induced land change processes relevant to land degradation under different scenarios of climate change and socio-economic conditions

Land degradation is a complex concept encompassing a variety of processes, natural or human induced, that affect the functioning of the land and the providing of ecosystem services. We propose a methodology to evaluate the impacts of future scenarios of socio-economic pathways and representative forcing pathways on land degradation. We selected a limited set of human induced land change processes that could potentially lead to land degradation and combined them spatially for each scenario. We compared the concurring variables between scenarios and over time to assess the sensitivity of the scenarios to the land change processes relevant for land degradation. With the processes or potential issues and the scenarios used in this study on Latin America end the Caribbean, we found (1) that the differences over time were much larger than those between scenarios and (2) that the effect of climate change was negligible compared to the socio-economic effect. Further investigation with more variables dependent on the climate scenarios is needed to confirm the results.