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Environmental Security
Chapter · December 2008
DOI: 10.1016/B978-008045405-4.00707-2
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G Zurlini and F Mu¨ller. Environmental Security. In Sven Erik Jørgensen and Brian D. Fath
(Editor-in-Chief), Systems Ecology. Vol. [2] of Encyclopedia of Ecology,
5 vols. pp. [1350-1356] Oxford: Elsevier.
Author's personal copy
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Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations.
Environmental Security
G Zurlini and F Mu¨ ller, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy
ª 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Introducing Environmental Security
Defining Environmental Security
A Socioecological Perspective of Some Recent
Threats to Environmental Security
Resilience
Environmental Security and Sustainability
Environmental Security and the DPSIR Model
Further Reading
Introducing Environmental Security
The relationship between environmental change, stress,
and environmental degradation relative to the issue of
security has garnered increased importance as new challenges
have emerged since the end of the Cold War. The
question of the relationship between environment and
security is now a common interest among both the scientific
and policy communities, especially as the traditional
security concepts based on national sovereignty have
been revisited following changes in the European political
landscape at the end of the twentieth century.
The notion of environmental security has been historically
linked to environmentally induced conflicts caused
by environmental degradation in one or more of the
following fields: overuse of renewable resources, pollution,
or impoverishment of human-settled places. The
notion has been developed mainly by international policy
researchers and has focused on the role of the scarcity of
renewable resources such as cropland, forests, water, and
fish stocks. Attention has been devoted to the theoretical
analysis of possible insecure pathways, beginning with
scarcity and leading to outbreaks of violence. Thus, environmental
security has been discussed as a concept of
international security policy.
Environmental degradation has various impacts on the
behavior of the involved actors and might play a role as
reason, trigger, target, channel, and catalyst of conflicts.
The decrease in quantity and quality of resources, rapid
population growth, and unequal resource access are the
basic drivers behind increasing environment-related
security risks. Notably renewable resources like water
and land are crucial factors in security issues, especially
with respect to instability and migration between and
within countries or regions. Scarcity of nonrenewable
resources can contribute to instability in the international
as well as in the national contexts.
The question then arises as to how such environmental
stresses and the associated risks might evolve. While the
debate on these issues is still ongoing, it is increasingly
accepted that environmental threats are escalating contributors
to insecurity and social conflicts among and
within countries.
Results of the increasing human appropriation of regional
landscapes can have a variety of ecological effects
directly drawing on the notion of environmental security.
Focusing on environmental security is the essential step to
be developed in the study of interactions between humans
and the environment in social–ecological systems (SESs)
(see Socioecological Systems), which in the real geographic
world are social–ecological landscapes (SELs) (see Fitness
Landscapes), and it is critical in understanding how
humans create and respond to environmental change.
Defining Environmental Security
A recent comprehensive overview of the environmental
security field observes that
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• the environment is the most transnational issue, and its
security is an important dimension of peace, national
security, and human rights;
• over the next 100 years, one-third of the current global
land cover will be transformed; hence the world will be
facing increasingly hard choices among consumption,
ecosystem services, restoration, preservation, or degradation;
and
• environmental security is central to the national security,
comprising the dynamics and interconnections
among humans and natural resources.
Based on these assumptions, there are many different
approaches to define environmental security, most of them
originating in international policy debates. Some of the
respective definitions have been documented in Table 1.
Traditionally, there are two main definitions of security
according to the two main points of view:
• Environmental security. The major challenge concerns
the global environmental change, focusing on the
interactions between ecosystems and mankind, the
effects of global environmental change on environmental
degradation, the effects of increasing social request
for resources, ecosystem services, and environmental
goods.
• Human security. This item addresses different security
aspects like social or political security. In this context,
values at risk are the survival of human beings and their
quality of life.
The relevant objects of environmental security are complex,
adaptive systems with two main components – the
social, characterized by human intent, and the ecological,
rising without intent; these have interacted historically,
and society strongly determines the landscape ecological
components of such systems.
To introduce environmental security with reference to
SESs, it is useful to refer to the definition provided by
Arnold Wolfers in 1962, stating ‘‘Environmental security,
in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to
acquired values, in a subjective sense, the absence of fear
that such values will be attacked.’’
Basically, it is necessary to consider that
• security of SELs must be assessed both objectively and
subjectively, because security is meaningless unless
there is somebody perceiving it;
• security is value laden, and what we consider values is
related to our normative systems that nowadays recognize
concepts like ecosystem functions and services,
ecosystem integrity, and sustainability as fundamental
values for the survival and well-being of mankind; and
• humans have been historically providing threats to
those values from local to global scale, but there are
also threats coming from natural hazards and disasters.
A Socioecological Perspective of Some
Recent Threats to Environmental Security
In this article, the notion of environmental security is
developed from a system ecology perspective, namely
with reference to threats to social–ecological systems
and ecosystems services. The overall conception of environmental
security is based on some general principles of
human environmental interactions:
• Human well-being has several key components: the
basic material needs for a good life, freedom and
choice, health, good social relations, and personal
security.
• How well-being is expressed and experienced is context
and situation dependent, reflecting local social and
personal factors such as geography, ecology, age, gender,
and culture. These concepts are complex and
value laden.
• Ecosystems are essential for human survival and wellbeing
through their provisioning, regulating, cultural,
and supporting services. Evidence in recent decades of
escalating human impacts on ecological systems worldwide
raises concerns about the consequences of
ecosystem changes for human well-being.
• Human well-being can be enhanced through sustainable
human interaction with ecosystems on the base of
appropriate instruments, institutions, organizations,
and technologies. The creation of these items through
participation and transparency may contribute to people’s
freedoms and choices and to increased economic,
social, and environmental security.
• There are direct and indirect pathways between ecosystem
change and human well-being, whether they
are positive or negative. Indirect effects are characterized
by more complex webs of causation, involving
social, economic, and political threads.
The dynamic spatial configuration resulting from human
appropriation of regional landscapes can have a variety of
ecological effects at multiple scales. For example, a direct
effect of urbanization is the alteration of local ecological
processes through the modification of land cover: converting
desert to residential land cover alters many environmental
parameters, such as soil physical and chemical properties,
water availability, vegetation, and associated animal and
microbial communities. Additionally, urbanization alters
the spatial configuration of land-cover patterns within a
region. New land-cover types are juxtaposed within increasingly
fragmented native land-cover types. Changes in the
structure of the landscape can have ecological effects such as
modifying nutrient transport and transformation and affecting
species persistence and biodiversity.
In the recent historical development of social-ecological
systems, there is an increasing superimposition of
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Table 1 Some definitions of environmental security
AC/UNU Millennium Project Environmental security is the relative public safety from
environmental dangers caused by natural or human
processes due to ignorance, accident, mismanagement or
design and originating within or across national borders.
AC/UNU Millennium Project Environmental security is the state of human–environment
dynamics that includes restoration of the environment
damaged by military actions, and amelioration of resource
scarcities, environmental degradation, and biological threats
that could lead to social disorder and conflict.
Environmental security is the proactive minimization of
anthropogenic threats to the functional integrity of the
biosphere and thus to its interdependent human component.
Barnett J (1997) ‘Environmental Security: Now What?’, seminar,
Department of International Relations, Keele University,
4 Dec. 1997.
Belluck DA, Hull RN, Benjamin SL, Alcorn J, and Linkov I (2006)
Environmental security, critical infrastructure and risk assessment:
Definitions and current trends. In: Morel B and Linkov I (eds.)
Environmental Security and Environmental Management, pp. 3–16.
Dortrecht: Springer.
By ensuring environmental security we mean guarding
against environmental degradation in order to preserve or
protect human, material, and natural resources at scales
ranging from global to local.
AC/UNU Millennium Project The term environmental security refers to a range of concerns
that can be organized into three general categories:
1. Concerns about the adverse impact of human activities on
the environment.
2. Concerns about the direct and indirect effects of various
forms of environmental change (especially scarcity and
degradation) which may be natural or human-generated on
national and regional security.
3. Concerns about the insecurity individuals and groups (from
small communities to humankind) experience due to
environmental change such as water scarcity, air pollution,
global warming, and so on. Combining these we might
conclude that the condition of environmental security is one in
which social systems interact with ecological systems in
sustainable ways, all individuals have fair and reasonable
access to environmental goods, and mechanisms exist to
address environmental crises and conflicts.
AC/UNU Millennium Project Environmental security is the maintenance of the physical
surroundings of society for its needs without diminishing the
natural stock.
‘Environmental security of Russia’, issue 2, The Security
Council of the Russian Federation, Moscow, 1996, p. 55
Environmental security is protectedness of natural
environment and vital interests of citizens, society, the state
from internal and external impacts, adverse processes and
trends in development that threaten human health,
biodiversity and sustainable functioning of ecosystems, and
survival of humankind. Environmental security is an integral
part of Russia’s national security.
US Department of Defense (1996) Environmental security is comprised of restoration,
compliance, conservation, pollution prevention,
environmental security technology, and international
activities.
‘On Principles of Environmental Security in the Commonwealth
States’, Dec. 4 1997
Environmental security is the state of protection of vital
interests of the individual, society, natural environment from
threats resulting from anthropogenic and natural impacts on
the environment.
NATO Science Programme 1997 Scientific problems related to environmental security
including the reclamation of contaminated military sites,
regional environmental problems and natural and man-made
disasters; affordable cleanup technologies are of particular
interest.
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technostructure, biostructure, and ecostructure called
‘technosubstitution’, which leads to an increase in thermodynamic
flows and sinks. This has large consequences on
ecological patterns and processes, and thus on ecosystem
services and sustainability.
In short, the previous statements could be tentatively
reformulated to define environmental security according to
the following: environmental security, in an objective sense,
aims to evaluate the level of threats to acquire and sustain
ecosystem values in terms of ecosystem goods and services at
multiple scales and, in a subjective sense, represents the level
of fear that such values will be attacked and possibly lost.
In the above definition, environmental security has to
do with risks or fragility (vulnerability) of losing ecosystem
goods and services as well as the perception of those
risks. Thus, fragility is deemed multilayered, multiscale,
and complex, existing in both the objective physical and
social realms, as well as in the subjective realm. Often it
exists because of the choices we make. As well, it is often
imposed upon people and communities because of our
political or social-economic systems. The perception of
security is quite fundamental at all levels of human organization,
from the individual to the governments. As to
environmental security in the subjective sense, the
‘threats’ are of an abstract nature, in the domains of feelings
and cognition.
The level of fear that such values will be attacked and
possibly lost much depends on the correct information
and the consciousness of the role and significance played
by ecosystem goods and services. In this respect, given
that both objective and subjective measures provide reliable
estimates of environmental security through, for
example, efficient indicators and sampling designs, it is
interesting to judge the concordance between ‘objective’
and ‘subjective’ evaluations.
As an example, the environmental security of the same
location might be evaluated differently in objective and
subjective terms (Table 2). In cases (a) and (d), there is
concordance between objective and subjective evaluations;
for case (a), both agree on positive (high) environmental
security, whereas for case (d) both agree on negative (low)
environmental security. In contrast, cases (b) and (c) are
discordant; in the first case, there is no fear that values such
as ecosystem goods and services will be attacked and
possibly lost, while the objective evaluation says just the
opposite. This is very dangerous but common in the real
world because people are often unaware of the
environmental degradation they cause. In contrast, in case
(c), there is fear that ecosystem goods and services will be
attacked and possibly lost (low environmental security) but
there is no objective reason for such fear. For example,
certain Mediterranean beaches are often naturally covered
by seaweed leaves (Posidonia oceanica), which is an indicator
of good coastal ecosystem quality. However, most tourists
wrongly perceive beaches covered by leaves as ‘dirty’ and
‘insecure’, so leaves are removed becoming a waste.
Departing from the individual perspective, security
can be derived through different livelihood strategies of
which the environmental strategy is one. Although fragility,
as the capacity to cope with external stress, is a
concept that deals with problems and stress situations –
the lack of security – in local people’s lives, the focus on
livelihood strategies and security can be seen as the
opposite. Studying the factors that make people feel safe
and secure gives us a deeper understanding of their dayto-day
thinking when making decisions that affect their
livelihood. It also puts focus on the strategies that work
well and could be further developed and encouraged from
a management and planning perspective.
Regarding the family perspective (the family level),
security is related to the feelings of safety, assurance, and
confidence in that the family will be able to secure a
livelihood for itself in the future, and the precautions that
the family members take to ensure this. The concept of
security is thus closely connected to what is most important
for local people – their everyday survival. This applies to
each hierarchical level of social organization.
Climate change is likely to make many threats worse,
especiallyheat waves, drought, and flood, and that occurs in a
context where many global and social trends are also creating
fragility. Where it is safe and ethical, the explicit inclusion in
social–ecological studies of people living and working in a
study area can promote scientific realism and reveal nonintuitive
causal relationships. This integration may provide
social benefits, including a better public perception of science
and scientists. A holistic or ‘integrated risk management’
approach is needed, to reduce fragility and deal with risk
effectively. Environmental security is such an integrated risk
assessment and management approach.
Resilience
A social–ecological perspective of environmental security
stresses adaptability and learning through thoughtful
probing. Emphasis needs to be placed both on dealing
with threats and hazards, and on human response to risk.
Encouraging risk-adverse behavior or discouraging riskprone
behavior is more effective than simplistic schemes
intended to reduce hazard. The reason for this is that
people tend to engage in more risky behavior, if they
perceive a more secure environment (risk homeostasis).
Table 2 Possible combinations between ‘objective’ and
‘subjective’ evaluations
Objective
Subjective þþ (a) þ À (b)
À þ (c) À À (d)
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There can be large differences among countries, in
terms of the causes of fragility and coping capacity. The
root causes, where choices exist, arise from (1) how we
perceive and respond to risk, (2) how we relate to the
natural environment, and (3) our values.
Our present system of economic values is based upon a
static view, and it is heavily influenced by wealth and
power distributions of the status quo. In contrast, the
evolutionary basis of our biological insight stresses adaptation
and response to changing conditions.
The flip side of fragility, which is resilience, requires
greater attention than is given at the moment for addressing
environmental security issues. In its current form, resilience
is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize
while undergoing change so as to still retain
essentially the same identity, function, structure, and feedbacks.
Resilience and fragility are inversely related to each
other. Because SESs are complex and exhibit chaotic behavior,
to cope with environmental threats optimal solutions
do not exist, as it is difficult to learn general lessons from
several local cases, whereas we need to know trends at
different scales. Both holistic solutions and cultural change
are necessary to reduce risk and improve environmental
security.
The current state of understanding how to measure
and manage for resilience in SESs can be approached with
a set of scenarios and simple models to guide in the
identification and manipulation of the system’s resilience
on an ongoing basis and during times of crisis. This
process emphasizes the chaos created by disasters (take
the recent New Orleans flood as example), and the means
by which people move to rational decision making, either
through research or bargaining, depending upon what is
known or unknown.
In this approach, the sustainability of any particular state
depends on the properties of the stability domain corresponding
to that state. Ecological sustainability is often
described in terms of the resilience of the system, and that
implies also the capacity to manage environmental security.
Environmental Security and Sustainability
The main area of interest of environmental security is the
intersection of three different capitals: social, ecological,
and economic. Many of our popular and scientific ideas
are based upon a static view of the world and of the place
of humans in it. Some views of sustainability have this
static quality.
The welfare function provides a way of thinking about
the sustainability of economic and environmental change.
There is no generally accepted definition of sustainable
development (and it is doubtful whether the concept has
scientific validity).
Of all the environmental policy concepts to emerge in
the last 20 years, none is more compelling than that of
sustainability. The concept was put on the international
policy agenda by the Brundtland Commission more than
a decade ago, by formulating the classic definition of
sustainable development, namely, development that
‘‘seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present
without compromising the ability to meet those of the
future.’’ The introduction of these concepts has raised the
important question as to whether humanity at the global
scale is currently on a sustainable or unsustainable path.
An alternative approach is to consider the sustainability
of an economy and its supporting environment in
terms of its capacity to absorb stress and shock without
fundamental change (resilience). For any economy, there
are many possible states, each delivering different levels
of welfare to society.
Ultimately, the major obstacles to sustainable development
can be reduced to three basic categories:
willingness, understanding, and capacity. The first and
major obstacle has been described as a lack of political
will to implement those changes that are glaringly necessary.
Asymmetric power structures, vested interests, and
conceptions by humankind which emphasize antagonism,
competition, and individualism over cooperation and
solidarity lie at the heart of this obstacle. Even in cases
where political will is present, another obstacle is the lack
of understanding of the behavior of complex systems.
This understanding is often failure to address the relevant
linkages within and between systems and across scales.
Compartmentalized perceptions of reality and a scientific
tradition and training that are still largely reductionist
impair the development of understanding. Inadequate
institutions, lack of financial resources, unskilled human
resources, weak infrastructure, plain poverty, and other
limitations contribute to the third obstacle: insufficient
capacity to perform the actions and changes needed, affecting
notably (but not exclusively) the developing world.
Self-organization of ecological systems establishes the
arena for evolutionary change. Self-organization of human
institutional patterns establishes the arena for future sustainable
opportunity. Selective pressures also come from aspects
of the physical–chemical environment, such as geomorphology,
hydrology, biogeochemistry, and climate. Evolution, in
turn, shapes ecosystems because ecological systems are selforganized
from evolved components. Those self-organized
components include some suites of organisms that create
physical structure and are reenforced by that structure.
Others act as ‘ecological engineers’ altering the physical
structure and especially the biogeochemistry of ecosystems.
As a consequence, the interplay of evolution, ecology,
and the physical–chemical environment is a complicated
dynamic arena, in which configuration and control
change eternally. Humans facilitate self-organized
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patterns more intensively and over much larger scale
ranges than do other organisms.
Environmental Security and the DPSIR
Model
Systems with high adaptive capacity are able to reconfigure
themselves without significant declines in crucial functions
in relation to primary productivity, hydrological cycles,
social relations, and economic prosperity. A consequence
of a loss of resilience, and therefore of adaptive capacity, is
loss of opportunity, constrained options during periods of
reorganization and renewal, and an inability of the system
to do different things.
The effect of this is for the SES to emerge from such a
period along an undesirable trajectory, lowering environmental
security.
Are there elements that sustain adaptive capacity and
management (see Adaptive Management and Integrative
Assessments) of SESs in a world that is constantly changing?
Addressing how people respond to periods of change, how
society reorganizes following change, is the most neglected
and the least understood aspect in conventional resource
management and science.
Resilience is the key to enhancing adaptive capacity. It
is possible to identify and expand on four critical factors
that interact across temporal and spatial scales and that
seem to be required for dealing with natural resource
dynamics during periods of change and reorganization:
• learning to live with change and uncertainty;
• nurturing diversity for resilience;
• combining different types of knowledge for learning;
and
• creating opportunity for self-organization toward
social–ecological sustainability.
To assess determinants and constraints of environmental
security, a conceptual model can be adopted like drivers,
pressures, state, impacts, responses (DPSIR) model
(Figure 1). The assessment of threats directly refers to
risk assessment, that is, socioecological system fragility at
multiple scales and levels of social organization. Within
socioecological landscapes, the agents and factors determining
and constraining environmental security can be
represented in terms of driving forces, pressures, states,
impacts, and responses, according to the DPSIR scheme
adopted in the EU (Figure 1).
These items are arranged with respect to different steps
of environmental agency. Within all these steps, effects can
lead to modifications of environmental security. Land use
provokes a change of landscape states (including states with
increasing risks), and this modification effects modifications
of ecosystem or landscape services (e.g., including reduced
provisions of focal goods and regulations). As a consequence,
several items of human well-being will be changed, leading
to new societal demands, drivers, and motivations (including
Contextual
constraints
__________
Social change
Political change
Technological change
Cultural change
Human
well-being
__________
Basic supply
Health
Social security
Education
. . .
Ecosystem
services
__________
Provisioning
Regulating
Cultural
Supporting
Landscape
state/integrity
__________
Structural
Functional
Land use
__________
Spatial (structural)
Intensity (functional)
Contextual
constraints
__________
External
environmental
changes
PressureState
ImpactDrivers
Response
Decision
process
__________
Formation of opinions
Governance
Participation
Drivers
__________
Socioeconomic
Sociopolitical
Demographic
Technological
Cultural/religious
Environmental
security is related to
the risks of losing
ecosystem services
Environmental
security can influence
the overall security
of a political system
Demographic
change as a
focal item of
case studies
Figure 1 A conceptual DPSIR model of human–environmental systems, focusing on the risk of losing ecosystem goods and services
(see Ecosystem Services), exemplified by the potential consequences of demographic change.
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security-relevant developments in the society). These items
influence the environmental decision processes in correlation
with external constraints, and finally new opinions on
how to cope with the environment will be realized in
political decision processes.
The ecological key variable within this human–
environmental cycle is ecosystem or landscape integrity.
In some interpretations, integrity is strongly related to the
idea of wilderness, other authors refer to a social value
perspective, and in a third group of interpretations integrity
represents a complex systems approach, which is
mainly based upon variables of energy and matter budgets
and structural features of whole ecosystems.
Taking into account the focal ideas of the security concept,
it is possible to use an alternative formulation for the
ecological components of sustainable development: ‘meet
the needs of future generations’ in this context means ‘keep
available ecosystem services on a long-term, intergenerational
and, on broad scale, intragenerational level’. From a
synoptic viewpoint at the categories of ecosystem services,
one fact becomes obvious: all ecosystem services are
strongly dependent on the performance of the regulation
functions. The correlated processes do not only influence
production rates and supporting services, but in the long run
they also determine the potentials of ecosystems to provide
provisioning and cultural services.
If we take into account that the integral of the regulation
services represents self-organized processes in ecosystems,
it becomes clear that the respective benefits are strictly
dependent on the degrees and the potentials of selforganization.
To maintain these services, the ability for
future self-organizing processes within the respective
system has to be preserved. Applying this viewpoint, we
can define ecological integrity as a ‘political target for the
preservation against nonspecific ecological risks that are
general disturbances of the selforganizing capacity of
ecological systems. Thus, the goal should be a support
and preservation of those processes and structures which
are essential prerequisites of the ecological ability for selforganization’.
Such an adaptive management (see Adaptive
Management and Integrative Assessments) strategy, which
contains flexible reactions, attempting to improve the regulation
capacities of ecosystems, could be a very effective
means to foster environmental security.
See also: Adaptive Management and Integrative
assessments; Ecosystem Services; Fitness Landscapes;
Socioecological Systems.
Further Reading
Alcamo J, Bennett EM, and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA)
(2003) Ecosystems and Human Well-Being. Washington, DC: Island
Press.
Allenby BR (2000) Environmental security: Concept and
implementation. International Political Science Review 21(1): 5–21.
Belluck DA, Hull RN, Benjamin SL, Alcorn J, and Linkov I (2006)
Environmental security, critical infrastructure and risk assessment:
Definitions and current trends. In: Morel B and Linkov I (eds.)
Environmental Security and Environmental Management, pp. 3–16.
Dordrecht: Springer.
Graeger N (1996) Environmental security? Journal of Peace Research
33(1): 109–116.
Lonergan S (ed.) (1999) NATO Science Partnership Sub-Series 2:
Environmental Security, Vol. 65: Environmental Change, Adaptation
and Security. New York: Springer.
Environmental Space
L Hens and L X Quynh, Free University of Brussels (VUB), Brussels, Belgium
ª 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Defining the Concept
Quantification of the ‘Environmental Space’
Sustainable Development – Fair Share of Environmental
Space
Further Reading
Introduction
The concept of ‘environmental space’ was first developed
in the 1980s as an academic concept. It was mentioned as
‘environmental utilization space’ by Siebert in 1982 and
Opschoor in 1987. According to Opschoor, ‘‘the ‘environmental
utilization space’ reflects that at any given point in
time, there are limits to the amount of environmental
pressure that the Earth’s ecosystems can handle without
irreversible damage to these systems or to the life-support
processes that they enable.’’ The ‘environmental utilization
space’ consists of both ‘stocks’ (renewable,
semirenewable, and nonrenewable resources) and ‘sinks’
(capacity to absorb human impacts).
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