Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
serve and to wisely manage global ecosystems in the twenty-first century.
This report recognized that citizens, policy makers, resource managers, and
leaders of business and industry routinely must make decisions concerning
the exploitation of resources, but that these decisions cannot be made ef-
fectively with limited understanding of the interplay between human dom-
ination of ecosystems and impacts on ecosystem function.
According to the report, effective environmental decision-making re-
quires better scientific understanding on three major issues at the nexus be-
tween human society and their exploitation of ecosystems:
•
Global Change
, which includes the ecological consequences of natu-
ral and human-caused changes in climate, soil properties, water
quality, and land- and water-use patterns.
•
Biological Diversity
, which includes the natural basis for the distribu-
tion and abundance of species and habitats, human-caused alter-
ations to those patterns locally as well as globally, and the link
between diversity and the sustainable functioning of ecosystems.
•
Sustainable Ecological Systems
, which includes the response of ecologi-
cal systems to exploitation and disturbances, the restoration of
ecosystems, the sustainable management of ecological systems,
and the interface between ecological processes and human social
systems.
I deal with each of those issues consistently throughout the topic. But
each issue can grade into the other. For example, global change through con-
version of forest land into agriculture can impact the distribution and abun-
dance of species—biodiversity.Thus, rather than treat each issue separately,
they are interwoven throughout topic.The Sustainable Biosphere Initiative
report also points out that in order to make effective choices and decisions
about the environment in light of these issues we need to answer several big
questions about ecology and ecological systems.These questions are:
1. What is the role of ecological science in decision-making?
2. What factors govern the assembly of ecosystems and determine
their response to various stressors?
3. How does the earth's climate system function and determine the
distribution of life on Earth?
4. What factors control the size of populations?
