Environmental and Societal Impacts Group (ESIG)

Rates and Processes of Environmental Change

Rates and Processes Initiative. Glantz, assisted by Collins, continued to work on this initiative during FY95. Using a variety of methods and measures, scientists provide many different and often conflicting rates of environmental change to describe a single environmental problem. As a result, there is a broad range of rates available that describe such environmental changes as deforestation, desertification, ozone depletion, and many more. The range of rates is so broad that policy-makers, the media, and decision-makers at all levels are then free to select a rate from this range (from slowest to fastest) to discuss an environmental change. Such discussions will likely elicit a "desired" response from the general public or other policy-makers rather than provide a more "objective" description that may enhance policy-making.

The Rates and Processes Initiative is designed to assist policy-making related to global climate change and other environmental problems by achieving a number of objectives:

(1) identifying the wide range of rates estimates of four environmental changes (deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and the Congo, desertification in the West African Sahel, mangrove destruction in Southeast Asia, and the decline in the level of the Aral Sea);

(2) identifying human processes driving the rates of change in order to demonstrate how policies may be devised to decelerate rates; and

(3) understanding how estimates of rates are used in national and international policy- making related to global environmental change.

Collins worked toward obtaining additional funding support, continued the ongoing collection of rates estimates and information on human processes for all noted environmental changes, and conducted extensive research on mangrove destruction in Vietnam and Thailand. Sylvain Bayalama (University of Denver) prepared a thesis on deforestation in the Congo Basin for which Glantz served as an adviser. The thesis is a contribution to the Rates and Processes Initiative.

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