RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS Land Use Change in India (1700–2000) as Examined through the Lens of Human Appropriation of Net Primary Productivity Priyanka deSouza 1 and Yadvinder Malhi 2 1 Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA 2 Environmental Change Institute, Oriel College, Oxford, United Kingdom Summary Land use caused by human socioeconomic activities is a driver of change in the global environment. To understand and quantify land-use change on Earth’s natural systems, in- terdisciplinary approaches linking biophysical and socioeconomic parameters are required. One approach to understand the degree of terrestrial colonization of the biosphere is using the human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP). HANPP is defined as the difference between the net primary productivity (NPP) of potential vegetation and the actual NPP for a given area of land. Here, we use HANPP as a lens to examine land-use change in India from 1700 to 2007 using a spatially explicit data set that extends over this period. We also used the nongridded, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data set to calculate HANPP for India from 1961 to 2012 and compared our results. The average potential NPP for India was estimated to be 664 grams of carbon per square meter per year (g C/m 2 /year). Between 1700 and 2012, the fraction of pastureland and cropland increased from 20% to almost 60%. HANPP as a fraction of the potential NPP increased from 29% to 73% over this period. Calculations of HANPP using the FAO data set yielded an increase from 600 g C/m 2 to just over 700 g C/m 2 between 1961 and 2012. We also calculated the embodied HANPP of India by considering imports and exports, but the difference between the two is negligible in comparison to the HANPP of India. We further examined the variation of HANPP with socioeconomic parameters such as the Human Development Index (HDI) and population density. There was a roughly negative trend of HANPP with HDI. HANPP roughly increases with population density and then plateaus above a population density of roughly 200 persons per square kilometer. Keywords: embodied human appropriation of net primary productivity gross primary productivity human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP) India land-use change net primary productivity Introduction Since the Neolithic revolution in the early Holocene, hu- mans have “colonized” land by channeling terrestrial ecosystem processes to maximize their utility for social purposes, that is, Conflict of interest statement: The authors have no conflict to declare. Address correspondence to: Priyanka deSouza, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Urban Studies and Planning, Building 9, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA. Email: desouzap@mit.edu © 2017 by Yale University DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12650 Editor managing review: Heinz Schandl Volume 00, Number 0 to produce as much of biomass as possible for food, feed, and energy; as well as to convert land area itself to create living and working spaces (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1998). The idea of land-use change thus explicitly recognizes that the socioeco- nomic activities of humans are inextricably linked with the www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jie Journal of Industrial Ecology 1