Decoupling Indicators of Soil Erosion for Agro-ecosystem Assessment

Abstract

Accelerated soil erosion is generally thought to couple with population growth, land exploitation and environmental degradation, thus soil erosion has been considered as a major pressure of sustainable development of agroecosystem. Nevertheless, implementation of wise policy and application of sound new techniques combined with traditional knowledge, may lead to less soil erosion or limited erosion under the tolerable value while intensive land use or exploitation is adopted for the population and economic growth. Such process of breaking the link between environmental bads and economic goods was termed as decoupling . The present paper, based on DPSIR strategical framework of indicator selection, developed new indicators to assess such decoupling process of soil erosion from sustainable development of agro-ecosystem. A primary application of decoupling indicators was carried out on the Loess Plateau of China to figure out the relationship between human activities and soil erosion. Intensive soil erosion on the Loess Plateau in the 1930s and 1960s coincide with the Wars and the Culture Revolution respectively. A decoupling process of soil erosion from sustainable agroecosystem development has appeared since the 1980s because of adoption of watershed-based comprehensive soil-water conservation.