Agriculture and forestry play an important role in emitting and storing greenhouse gases. For an efficient and cost-effective climate policy it is therefore important to explicitly include land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) in economy-climate models. This paper gives an overview and assessment of existing approaches to include land use, land-use change, and forestry into climate-economy models or to link economy-climate models to land-use models.

Climate changes affect the abundance, geographic extent, and floral composition of vegetation, which are reflected in the pollen rain. Sediment cores taken from lakes and peat bogs can be analysed for their pollen content. The fossil pollen records provide information on the temporal changes in climate and palaeo-environments. Although the complexity of the variables influencing vegetation distribution requires a multi-dimensional approach, only a few research projects have used GIS to analyse pollen data.

Desertification has recognized as an environmental problem by many international organizations such as UN, NATO and FAO. Desertification in Turkey is generally caused by incorrect land use, excessive grazing, forest fires, urbanization, industry, genetic erosion, soil erosion, salinization, and uncontrolled wild type plants picking. Due to anthropogenic destruction of forest, steppe flora gradually became dominant in Anatolia. In terms of biodiversity, Turkey has a significant importance in Europe and Middle East.

Borneo has experienced heavy deforestation and forest degradation during the past two decades. In this study the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer was used to monitor land cover change in Borneo between 2002 and 2005 in order to assess the current extent of the forest cover, the deforestation rate and the role of fire. Using Landsat and ground observation for validation it was possible to discriminate 11 land cover classes. In 2002 57% of the land surface of Borneo was covered with forest of which 74% was dipterocarp and more than 23% peat swamp forest.

The majority of landscapes around the world have been modified or transformed by human activities to meet the needs of human societies. The loss of native vegetation for agricultural development affects the sustainability of growing proportion of the world's ecosystems. Factors such as land tenure, roads and agricultural intensification, together with biophysical properties, have been cited as drivers of deforestation.

Karst rocky desertification is a typical type of land degradation in the Southwestern China. It has great ecological and economical implications for the local people. Landsat images from the middle of Guizhou Province collected in 1974, 1993 and 2001 were used for change detection of the pattern of Karst rocky desertification. The results show the following findings: (1) Desertification area expanded drastically in 27 years, at an increasing rate about 116.2 km²/year. (2) High areas (900-1,500 m) are the most affected.

Land use and land cover changes in the Brazilian Amazon have major implications for regional and global carbon (C) cycling. Cattle pasture represents the largest single use (about 70%) of this once-forested land in most of the region. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of the RothC and Century models at estimating soil organic C (SOC) changes under forest-to-pasture conditions in the Brazilian Amazon. We used data from 11 site-specific 'forest to pasture' chronosequences with the Century Ecosystem Model (Century 4.0) and the Rothamsted C Model (RothC 26.3).

Estimates of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks and changes under different land use systems can help determine vulnerability to land degradation. Such information is important for countries in arid areas with high susceptibility to desertification. SOC stocks, and predicted changes between 2000 and 2030, were determined at the national scale for Jordan using The Global Environment Facility Soil Organic Carbon (GEFSOC) Modelling System.