Land-Change Driver Analysis

Land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) analysis is the land-change-science method for detecting how the Earth's surface is being transformed and explaining why, with particular attention to the social drivers behind the change. Its defining move, formalized by Eric Lambin and Helmut Geist, is to separate proximate causes, the direct human activities such as agricultural expansion, wood extraction, and infrastructure that physically alter land cover, from underlying driving forces, the demographic, economic, technological, institutional, and cultural factors that operate at a distance and push the proximate causes. Their meta-analysis of tropical deforestation showed that single-factor explanations are rare and that change is usually produced by synergistic combinations of drivers. The analysis chains remote sensing of cover change to a structured causal attribution, giving social scientists a rigorous way to link maps of deforestation or urbanization to the human forces that produce them.