Today, a number of quantitative models to assess soil erosion risks and factors influencing soil erosion risk is available. However, these models are developed for the temperate zones in Northern America and Europe and would need adaptation to the conditions of catchments in other climatic zones. For example, there is no soil erosion risk modelling approach for tropical regions available at the present. Additionally, most of the modelling approaches concentrate on a limited number of factors.

Two exemplary approaches to estimate soil erosion risk are (see figure):

• A semi-quantitative approach: is based on a qualitative weighting of numerically scaled data.
• A qualitative approach: is based on qualitative weighting of the landscape factors (Beck et al. 2004).