R.E. Munn

Sustainable development of the biosphere

The Sustainable Development of the Biosphere is a book which explains an ambitious international program begun in 1982 at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. The program brings together historians, geographers, environmental scientists, economists, managers, and policymakers from a wide range of countries to address the question, what should society do to reverse global changes caused by the degradation of the environment. This book of collected and edited overviews represents the conclusion of the first phase of a program that is planned to continue for several more years.

The design of integrated monitoring systems to provide early indications of environmental/ecological changes

One of the important goals of the next several decades is to achieve and maintain ecologically sustainable development of the biosphere. However, the management of ecological systems is rather difficult, largely because of uncertainties in long-term predictions of environmental and ecological behaviour. Thus, one of the objectives for integrated monitoring should be to provide early indications of impending changes so that mitigative actions can be taken.This paper includes a discussion of the factors to be considered in the design of early-warning monitoring systems, and gives some examples. One approach that appears to be particularly promising is that of identifying, quantifying and monitoring the stresses, feedbacks and component lags in the environmental-ecological system being studied.

Environmental Prospects for the Next Century: Implications for Long-Term Policy and Research Strategies

This report examines environmental prospects for the twenty-first century, and then suggests some appropriate long-term management strategies and research priorities. A few current global trends (e.g., increasing concentrations of atmospheric trace gases, population, agricultural production) are practically irreversible over the next couple of decades due to inertias in the systems involved. However, there are bound to be nonlinearities, discontinuities, and surprises in the behavior of many environmental and socioeconomic systems. In fact, the main challenge for managers, policy analysts, and politicians is to develop strategies that are robust in response to these surprises, exploiting the opportunities as well as softening the shocks that may arise. The main characteristics of such strategies are that they be adaptive, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral. As pointed out by Harvey Brooks [2], we must avoid partial solutions that may be optimal for a particular sector or decade, but which are far from optimal for the biosphere as a whole over the long term.

The early detection of sulphur emissions reductions using Wet Deposition Measurements

This paper is the outgrowth of a workshop on the Detection of Trends in Wet Deposition Data, attended by atmospheric modellers, atmospheric chemists and statisticians in Toronto, November 1983. Methods for detecting changes or trends in network data which are described and evaluated include statistical and meteorological analyses of ‘before’ and ‘after’ time series at single stations, the analysis of changes in frequency distributions, and the analysis of entire network data sets. Relative advantages of using precipitation concentration vs deposition data sets are examined, and the added information on trends available from air concentration measurements (SO2 and particle-SO42−) is shown. The paper concludes with recommendations for data requirements and preferred approaches to trend or change detection using available statistical and modelling techniques.

Sustainable Development of the Biosphere

The future management of the worlds resources depends upon reconciling the needs of socio-economic development with the conservation of the worlds environment. This book provides a strategic framework for understanding and managing the long-term and large-scale interactions between these two requirements, based upon the sustainable development of the natural resources of the biosphere. It represents the first results of an on-going collaborative study organized by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and involving some of the worlds leading historians, natural scientists, development specialists and policy advisors. It provides an authoritative introduction to some of the most complex contemporary environmental issues, and is written in an easily comprehensible style to make the information accessible to a wide range of professional disciplines, to policy makers and analysts, and to the concerned layman.