One of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) challenges is to “develop procedures that can integrate local knowledge with data collected at the regional or global level and produce information that is salient, credible, and politically legitimate to the decision makers that are a major audience for the results of the MA” (Millennium Assessment 2002). This paper aims to contribute to such eff...

Managing the numerous and interrelated processes between man and nature in order to use renewable resources in a sustainable way is confronted with conflicting objectives, external effects, complex interdependencies, uncertainty and other features that make it nearly impossible to come to unambiguous optimal decisions. Self-organization in socio-economic and ecological systems the process of st...

Construction industry accounts for a significant portion of world economic activities, especially in emerging economies where infrastructure developments are much needed. Construction industry is typically characterized as a labor-intensive and low-tech sector. Meanwhile, it is also the sector consistently found the least productive. Commonly cited reasons for such poor performance in this sect...

Decision making for natural resource management, such as forest management, park management, and marine habitat management, requires complex and science-intensive balancing acts that weigh human and environmental considerations. These management decisions are characterized by both the potential for substantial gains and the risk of negative environmental consequences. Despite the inherent uncer...

A survey of numerous field studies shows that nitrogen and phosphorous export coefficients are significantly different across forest, agriculture, and urban land-cover types. We used simulations to estimate the land-cover composition at which there was a significant risk of nutrient loads representative of watersheds without forest cover. The results suggest that at between 20 percent and 30 pe...

In this chapter we reflect on a relatively small but influential example of adaptive management which seeks to enhance the environmental benefits of the flow regime in the highly regulated Mitta Mitta River in Australia’s MurrayDarling Basin. In 1999 an operational review recommended the reintroduction of greater in-stream flow variability in the Mitta Mitta River in an attempt to improve river...

Resilience is an emergent property of complex systems. Understanding resilience is critical for sustainability science, as linked social–ecological systems and the policy process that governs them have the capacity for nonlinear dynamics. The possibility of nonlinear change in these systems means that there is an inherent degree of uncertainty in social–ecological systems and the policy process...

Resilience is an emergent property of complex systems. Understanding resilience is critical for sustainability science, as linked social–ecological systems and the policy process that governs them have the capacity for nonlinear dynamics. The possibility of nonlinear change in these systems means that there is an inherent degree of uncertainty in social–ecological systems and the policy process...

The Associated Flood Management Programme of the World Meteorological Organisation and Global Water Partnership (2002) has suggested that there are a number of implications for flood management. he first of these is to recognise that the catchment is a system. If we consider the functioning of the catchment; it is a dynamic system in which there are exchanges and movements of sediment, water an...