This review volume covers the changes of land use/land cover in China during the recent 300 years. It aims to systematic review the historical land use changes in the past three centuries.China is one of the ancient civilization where mankind transform the environmental and land use in order to survive. This book provides the insightful knowledge into the historical changes, and the lesson learnt in the process of land use.

China’s air pollution is infamous. The haze can make it impossible to see buildings across the street, and the pollution forces schools to close and creates health and morbidity problems, in addition to tremendous environmental degradation. However, China also faces another important environmental problem, which is less well-known to the public: that of soil degradation and pollution. This book provides an overview of the problems related to soil degradation and pollution throughout China, examining how and why current policy has fallen short of expectation. It also examines the challenges faced by policy makers as they attempt to adopt sustainable practices alongside a booming and ever-expanding economy. China's Soil Pollution and Degradation Problems utilizes grey literature such as newspaper articles, NGO reports and Chinese government information alongside academic studies in order to provide an extensive review of the challenges faced by grassroots organizations as they tackle environmental policy failings throughout China. This book will be of great interest to students of environmental pollution and contemporary Chinese studies looking for an introduction to the topics of soil pollution and soil degradation, and for researchers looking for an extensive list of sources and analysis of China's environmental problems more broadly.

This book explores various approaches to reconstruct the spatial and temporal distribution of historical farmland in China. The book contains background information about political regimes, economic and social development, population changes and land resource utilization in the past 300 years in China. A literature review focuses on the assumptions, methodologies and models of reconstructing historical land-use datasets while addresses accuracy evaluation issues. Historical population size, its growth rate, and the evolution of spatial-temporal patterns of farmland in China have also been discussed. Almost all available historical data about farmland such as historical documents, archives, taxation records, statistics and research outcomes have been collected to reconstruct the amount of historical farmland. With a few principles and assumptions, a delicate Cellular Automaton (CA) and Multi-Agents (MAS) model based on bottom-up management scheme has been applied to derive the spatial-temporal distribution of farmland with the 1km*1km grid resolution for the period between 1661 and 1980 in China. Suggestions for future studies related to reconstructing historical land-use changes are then provided.

The Earth as Transformed by Human Action is the culmination of a mammoth undertaking involving the examination of the toll our continual strides forward, technical and social, take on our world. The purpose of such a study is to document the changes in the biosphere that have taken place over the last 300 years, to contrast global patterns of change to those appearing on a regional level, and to explain the major human forces that have driven these changes. The first section deals strictly with the major human forces of the past 300 years and the second is a detailed account of the transformations of the global environment wrought by human action. The final section examines a range of perspectives and theories that purport to explain human actions with regard to the biosphere.

The Climate Change 2007 volumes of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provide the most comprehensive and balanced assessment of climate change available. This IPCC Working Group I report brings us completely up-to-date on the full range of scientific aspects of climate change. Written by the world's leading experts, the IPCC volumes will again prove to be invaluable for researchers, students, and policymakers, and will form the standard reference works for policy decisions for government and industry worldwide.