It is important to study the contributions of climate change and human activities to spatial-temporal changes of cropland in the fields of climate change and land use change. Relationships between spatial-temporal cropland changes and driving forces were studied at qualitative aspects in most of the previous researches. However, the quantitative assessments of the contributions of climate change and human activities to spatial-temporal changes of cropland need to be explored for a better understanding of the dynamics of land use changes. We systematically reviewed the methods of identifying contributions of climate change and human activities to temporal-spatial cropland changes at quantitative aspects, e.g. model analysis, mathematical statistical method, framework analysis, index assessment and difference comparison. The progresses of the previous researches on quantitative evaluation of the contributions were introduced. However, there were four defects in assessing the contributions of climate change and human activities to spatial-temporal cropland changes. For example, the methods were lack of comprehensiveness, and the data need to be more accurate and abundant. Moreover, the scale was single and the explanations were biased. Meanwhile, we concluded a clue about quantitative approaches to assess the contributions from the synthetical aspect to specific driving forces. Besides, the solutions of the future researches on data, scale and explanation were proposed.