A Synthesis of Data and Methods across Scales to Connect Local Policy Decisions to Regional Environmental Conditions The Case of the Cascadia Scorecard

the goals of sustainable development. The transformation of land and ecological processes resulting from development is a driving force behind the lost ecological services that concern the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. A quick glance at just a few global trends suggests why urbanization has quickly become an issue in need of deeper understanding. Whereas less than 30 percent of the global population lived in urban settings in 1950, nearly 50 percent does so today. For the first time in history, more global residents live in urban areas than not. In the United States, 80 percent of citizens live in urban and suburban areas (Blair 2004). More than half live in coastal counties, where 27 million additional inhabitants are expected in only the next fifteen years (Beach 2002). In South America, 84 percent of all residents are expected to live in urban settings by 2010, completing a remarkable transition that will put the distribution of urban residents on a level equal to that of Northern Europe (Population Reference Bureau 2004). Challenges posed by geographic and temporal scale underlie the problems researchers face in measuring this dramatic trend of urbanization. Measuring urban sprawl is a highly scale dependent undertaking. Whether or not a region sprawls very much depends on the extent, scale, and resolution of the analysis. An adequate policy response has been slow in coming because complicated scale questions muddy our understanding of how, and in response to what Chapter 5