Toward Ecological Sustainability in Europe [antikvár]

preiace Humán activities have induced ecological changé for thousands of years. Recently, however, these activities have generated global-scale ecological changes, threatening the delicate relationship between the earth's ecosystems which support life, and the environmental characteristics which are required for survival of the ecosystems. At the same time, it is clear that additional global development is both desirable and inevitable. IIASA's Biosphere Dynamics Project addresses these long-term and large-scale interactions between humán activities and the ecological aspects of the environment. Four features distinguish the Project: (1) The project deals with the subset of environmental issues which are ecological, that is, focussed on the interactions among organisms and the relationships between organisms and their environment. As a result, the project seeks particularly to predict effects of environmental change upon unmanaged biotic communities and ecosystems, endangered species, biotic reserves, and the like. (2) The project is concerned with sustainability and hence, with time scales long enough to establish that systems are sustainable. The annual to decadal time horizon looks several centuries into the past and a century or more into the future; this aspect of research in the Biosphere Project includes the unanticipated long-term ecological consequences of development activities which were undertaken for their short-term benefits. (3) The project focus upon sustainable development results in the examination of the role played by humán activities in ecological and environmental problems. The activities of interest are those whose effects cross international boundaries, and whose effects cannot be ameliorated by individual countries working independently. (4) The project examines biospheric problems, rather than more régiónál concerns. We try to "think globally while measuring locally", i.e., to link large-scale consequences and implications of development to the causal