Drivers of Environmental Change and Development

According to World Commission on Environment and Development, the environment is where we live; and development is what we do to improve our well-beings. Both are inseparable. Major human driving forces of environmental use include
(a) Demographic change of environment in which there is relationship between population growth and other demographic factors such as migration; (b) Land use and land cover change includes biophysical and social dimensions of rapidly changing land use, human settlement and land cover patterns; (c) Urbanization and industrialization transformation highlights the linkage between dimensions covering environmental services and infrastructures for regulating the environment; (d) attitude and behavior and their role in driving environmental responses and the potential role of alternative development paths; (e) decentralized decision making process promoting the linkages between national, regional and local skills and the constraints to the transfer of policy instruments from one region to another. In recent years, dimensions of environmental change has encompassed a full range of social sciences disciplines necessary to analyze and understand people’s role as both the possible cause and target of environmental change as well as recognizing the local issues and use of local field based geographical studies supplemented by national and regional data. This should provide an indispensable contribution to analyze the key driving forces of land use maintenance and change and especially reflects the wide diversity of economic, social, cultural and institutional
practices and traditional knowledge at the local level (Phagocyte and Chanda, 2004).
This promotes interaction between local and regional communities, conflict prevention and resolution in critical environmental situations. This has direct implications for policy development and implementation in order to develop strong links between research community, policy makers and environmental management experts.

Resource Survey and Inventory of Vulnerable Environment

Vulnerability provides a basis for analyzing resource and environmental pressure. Vulnerability depends on exposure and sensitivity to impacts and the ability to cope or adapt. The Resource Information System (Mohammad et al., 2007) has to be considered as multidimensional i.e. attribute dimension, spatial dimension and temporal dimension. Indian geographic education offers such capabilities as they integrate multi-sector, multi-space, and multi-period perspective. Vulnerable environment is highly sensitive and responds rapidly to anthropogenic intervention. Its restoration needs a long time, especially if the vulnerable environment is degraded or stressed beyond a certain point(Singh, 2007; Blaikie, 2005). Observations using remote sensing and GIS, such environmental changes allow identification of major processes for change and by inference, the characterization of ecosystem dynamics. Empirical diagnostic models of environmental change can be developed from these observations. New technology applications for safeguarding the environment have increased dramatically in recent years(Singh, 2007; Ajai, 2004; Thangamani and Rao, 2007). The development of regional and global models can simulate both the sociology-economic and biophysical driving forces, interactions, feedback and their responses to environmental change.

Forest and Biodiversity

Biodiversity loss restricts our future development options (Singh, 2008). India isrich in flora. Considering that agriculture employs 64 per cent of the labor force, it is agriculture which is the mainstay in almost every state in India. Forests in India
constitutes 22 per cent, land not available for cultivation is 14 per cent, permanent pastures are only 4 per cent, whereas land under miscellaneous tree crops etc. are only 1


per cent. Total cultivable wasteland in India is 5 per cent, fallow land is 8 per cent and netarea sown is 46 per cent (Forest Survey of India, 2005; Government of India, 2004,
2007). Currently available data place India in the tenth position in the world and fourth in
Asia in plant diversity. From about 70 per cent geographical area surveyed so far, theBotanical Survey of India has described 47,000 species of plants. Indian Geography,
which integrates physical and social aspects of surrounding, can play effective role in
environmental management (Bisht et al., 2004; UNEP, 2007). In assessing environmentalchange and prediction of future of that environment in an integrated and holistic manner,
there is a number of emerging research areas relating to environmental changes whichrequire geographical enquiry in Indian context. The understanding of global
environmental change requires integrated emphasis on some promising geographicaltasks, i.e. reconstruction of landscape processes, environmental history for ecosystem,
state of environment and resource use, modeling of the dynamics of present day
landscapes, analysis of causes and consequences of anthropogenic changes. This is
possible with enhanced Geographic Information System (GIS) supported by detailed sitestudies (Singh and Mishra, 2005).