Understanding the history of how humans have interacted with the rest of nature can help clarify the options for managing our increasingly interconnected global system. Simple, deterministic relationships between environmental stress and social change are inadequate. Extreme drought, for instance, triggered both social collapse and ingenious management of water through irrigation. Human responses to change, in turn, feed into climate and ecological systems, producing a complex web of multidirectional connections in time and space. Integrated records of the co-evolving human-environment system over millennia are needed to provide a basis for a deeper understanding of the present and for forecasting the future. This requires the major task of assembling and integrating regional and global historical, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental records. Humans cannot predict the future. But, if we can adequately understand the past, we can use that understanding to influence our decisions and to create a better, more sustainable and desirable future.

Projected warming in Sweden and other Fennoscandian countries will probably increase growth rates of forest trees near their northern limits, increase the probability of new pest outbreaks, and foster northerly migration of both native and exotic species. The greatest challenges for sustainable forestry are to restore and enhance the ecological and socioeconomic diversity of intensively managed forested landscapes. With appropriate management, climate warming may facilitate the regeneration of this diversity. Experimental transplant gardens along latitudinal or altitudinal gradients and high-resolution maps of expected future climate could provide a scientific basis for predicting the climate response of potential migrant species. Management of corridors and assisted migration could speed the movement of appropriate species.

Coastal areas are exposed to a variety of threats due to high population densities and rapid economic development. How will this affect human welfare and our dependence on nature's capacity to provide ecosystem goods and services? This paper is original in evaluating this concern for major habitats (macroalgae, seagrasses, blue mussel beds, and unvegetated soft bottoms) in a temperate coastal setting. More than 40 categories of goods and services are classified into provisional, regulating, and cultural services. A wide variety of Swedish examples is described for each category, including accounts of economic values and the relative importance of different habitats. For example, distinguishing characteristics would be the exceptional importance of blue mussels for mitigation of eutrophication, sandy soft bottoms for recreational uses, and seagrasses and macroalgae for fisheries production and control of wave and current energy. Net changes in the provision of goods and services are evaluated for three cases of observed coastal ecosystem shifts: i) seagrass beds into unvegetated substrate; ii) unvegetated shallow soft bottoms into filamentous algal mat dominance; and iii) macroalgae into mussel beds on hard substrate. The results are discussed in a management context including accounts of biodiversity, interconnectedness of ecosystems, and potential of economic valuation.

Conflicts between the conservation of biodiversity and other human activities have been and continue to be of increasing concern in the European Union, often having important political, economic, and environmental repercussions. These conflicts have been addressed in the European Union by using a wide array of top down and bottom up tools, with varying degrees of success. A new challenge is now facing Europe with the integration of 10 new countries in the European Union (EU) and an additional range of biodiversity-rich habitats placed under EU legislation. The rich biodiversity of the central and eastern European countries (CEEC) is likely to be threatened by some aspects of the integration process, and conflicts between the conservation of biodiversity and other human activities are expected. In this paper, we review certain existing conflicts between biodiversity conservation and human activities in the CEEC, expected conflicts associated with integration to the EU, particularly in terms of new policy and legislation implementation, and, finally, explore possible conflict management options.

We conducted a study to assess to what extent current ecolabels contain standards that stimulate conservation and sustainable use of on-farm biodiversity of agricultural landscapes (agrobiodiversity). First, we developed an agrobiodiversity management yardstick to assess and compare the labeling schemes of ecolabels for arable farming. Key characteristics of the yardstick are the five levels linking the abstract notion of agrobiodiversity management to concrete measures on a farm and its foundation upon expert judgment regarding the effect of farming practices on agrobiodiversity. Several environmental themes, among them agrobiodiversity management, are regulated through the standards of labeling schemes of ecolabels. With the aid of this yardstick, the labeling schemes were scrutinized and the number, average efficacy, and compulsory nature of relevant standards was determined for 10 categories of farm management. The results show that all examined ecolabels contain at least some standards that stimulate conservation and sustainable use of agrobiodiversity, but there are large differences between the labels. We consider the results of the five ecolabels to be insufficient to warrant their usefulness as a governance strategy that the Dutch government could refer to and depend on as part of a national agrobiodiversity policy to stimulate agrobiodiversity.

This paper focuses on appropriation of natural capital through construction of buildings. The ecological footprint and the Costanza natural capital concepts are applied. The environmental consequences of human settlement are currently of great concern, and a need is felt to reduce the impact of building on the environment. The embodied energy of building materials and the “land area” required to sustain their production are considered to evaluate the demand on nature of this activity. The ecological footprints of 2 typical Italian buildings are compared. The paper also focuses on how to reduce the natural capital appropriation of building construction by means of environmentally inexpensive materials, renewable energy resources, and optimization of the use of bioproductive land by construction of multistoried buildings. Finally, to allocate an environmental load of buildings, an economic evaluation of natural capital appropriation through building construction is proposed.

There is a need for a better understanding of the status of the environment. At the same time, concerns have been raised regarding alienation of the local populace from environmental decisions. One proposed solution is participatory environmental monitoring. When evaluating the usefulness of environmental monitoring, the focus may be on accuracy, as is usually done by scientists, or on efficiency in terms of conservation impact. To test whether investment in participatory biodiversity monitoring makes economic sense for obtaining data for management decisions, we compared the cost efficiency of participatory and conventional biodiversity monitoring methods in Philippine parks. We found that, from a government perspective, investment in monitoring that combines scientific with participatory methods is strikingly more effective than a similar level of investment in conventional scientific methods alone in generating conservation management interventions. Moreover, the local populace seemed to benefit from more secure de facto user rights over land and other resources. Participatory biodiversity monitoring not only represents a cost-effective alternative when conventional monitoring is impossible, but it is also an unexpectedly powerful complementary approach, capable of generating a much higher level of conservation management intervention, where conventional monitoring already takes place.

Many aquatic mollusks, such as the freshwater pearl mussel (Margaritifera margaritifera), are in decline throughout Europe. The reasons are largely unknown; factors that have been suggested to contribute are river bed compaction due to agricultural practices, eutrophication, or pollutants of various natures. Brittle shells of recently deceased pearl mussels from northern Bavaria with weak calcium incrustations point to the possibility that calcium metabolism is affected. It is known that certain persistent organic pollutants and some heavy metals may induce calcium deficiency in wildlife. Elevated levels of the organochlorine insecticide DDT and its metabolite DDE, as well as of cadmium and some other heavy metals, have been found in pearl mussels. Both classes of environmental pollutants are known to potentially interfere with calcium homeostasis.

The effects of global change and globalization of trade on the biosphere spur an increase in bioinvasions and their subsequent impact on ecosystems. Continental invading bivalves are important because of their impact on artificially-constructed structures. Limnoperna fortunei was first found in the Neotropical region in 1991. Since then it has dispersed upstream in the Plata and Guaíba basins at a rate of 240 km y⁻¹. This species causes macrofouling in a manner similar to that caused by Dreissena polymorpha. This paper describes the biology of L. fortunei larvae from a hydroelectric power plant in South America. We suggest the importance of knowing the biology of the invading species and the need to consider the settlement patterns and densities of larvae in each of the sectors of the facility in order to achieve a sustainable prevention/control of macrofouling. This study acquires a global significance under the assumption that L. fortunei will eventually invade North America and Europe.

Although sustainability and ethics are of increasing public importance, little research has been conducted to reveal its association with fish consumer behavior. Cross-sectional data were collected through a postal self-administered survey (June 2005) from a sample of 381 Flemish women aged 20–50 years. Consumers attach high perceived importance to sustainability and ethics related to fish. However, this perceived importance is neither correlated with fish consumption frequency nor with general attitude toward eating fish. Refusing to eat wild fish is grounded in sustainability and ethical concerns, whereas the decision not to eat farmed fish is associated with a lower expected intrinsic quality rather than shaped by importance attached to sustainability and ethical issues.

Conventional perceptions of the interactions between people and their environment are rapidly transforming. Old paradigms that view humans as separate from nature, natural resources as inexhaustible or endlessly substitutable, and the world as stable, predictable, and in balance are no longer tenable. New conceptual frameworks are rapidly emerging based on an adaptive approach that focuses on learning and flexible management in a dynamic social-ecological landscape. Using two iconic World Heritage Areas as case studies (the Great Barrier Reef and the Grand Canyon) we outline how an improved integration of the scientific and social aspects of natural resource management can guide the evolution of multiscale systems of governance that confront and cope with uncertainty, risk, and change in an increasingly human-dominated world.

In order for local community views to be incorporated into new development initiatives, their perceptions need to be clearly understood and documented in a format that is readily accessible to planners and developers. The current study sought to develop a predictive understanding of how the Punan Pelancau community, living in a forested landscape in East Kalimantan, assigns importance to its surrounding landscapes and to present these perceptions in the form of maps. The approach entailed the iterative use of a combination of participatory community evaluation methods and more formal modeling and geographic information system techniques. Results suggest that landscape importance is largely dictated by potential benefits, such as inputs to production, health, and houses. Neither land types nor distance were good predictors of landscape importance. The grid-cell method, developed as part of the study, appears to offer a simple technique to capture and present the knowledge of local communities, even where their relationship to the land is highly complex, as was the case for this particular community.

Land-cover change in eastern lowland Bolivia was documented using Landsat images from five epochs for all landscapes situated below the montane tree line at approximately 3000 m, including humid forest, inundated forest, seasonally dry forest, and cloud forest, as well as scrublands and grasslands. Deforestation in eastern Bolivia in 2004 covered 45 411 km², representing ∼9% of the original forest cover, with an additional conversion of 9042 km² of scrub and savanna habitats representing 17% of total historical land-cover change. Annual rates of land-cover change increased from ∼400 km² y⁻¹ in the 1960s to ∼2900 km² y⁻¹ in the last epoch spanning 2001 to 2004. This study provides Bolivia with a spatially explicit information resource to monitor future land-cover change, a prerequisite for proposed mechanisms to compensate countries for reducing carbon emissions as a result of deforestation. A comparison of the most recent epoch with previous periods shows that policies enacted in the late 1990s to promote forest conservation had no observable impact on reducing deforestation and that deforestation actually increased in some protected areas. The rate of land-cover change continues to increase linearly nationwide, but is growing faster in the Santa Cruz department because of the expansion of mechanized agriculture and cattle farms.

Although China has experienced economic progress since 1978, environmental degradation has caused many problems due to population increases and demand for natural resources. These pressures have led to the use of inappropriate cultivation methods in agriculture, forestry, and livestock raising, and increasing amounts of vegetation and forests are still being destroyed (1). Environmental degradation will be one of the great threats to global environmental health in the future.