Understanding Environmental Change

Description

To understand global environmental change it is necessary to focus on the interactions of environmental systems such as the atmosphere, the biosphere, the geosphere and the hydrosphere with man-made systems including economic, political, cultural, and sociotechnical systems. Human systems and environmental systems meet in two places: where human actions proximately cause environmental change i.e. where they directly alter aspects of the environment and where environmental changes directly affect what humans value.
Almost all human activity has some potential relevance to global change. Researchers in a number of fields have studied human- environment interactions, usually within the boundaries of single disciplines and almost always below the global level. They have demonstrated that a complex of social, political, economic, technological, and cultural variables, sometimes referred to as driving forces, influences the human activities that proximately cause global change.
This book provides a basic grounding in the science of global environmental change. The philosophy of the text is based on the view that an understanding of natural global change is necessary to assess the impact of human activity. The sheer excitement of the science, the wealth of facts and the clarity of the exposition will make it an ideal undergraduate and master’s degree course book.