Tim Schniedwind
CVEN 689
Journal Review #2
GIS-based assessment of the threat to world forests by patterns of non-sustainable civilisation nature interaction,Journal of Environmental Management, Volume 59, Issue 4, August 2000, Pages 279-298
M. Cassel-Gintz and G. Petschel-Held
Abastract
The paper presents a novel transdisciplinary approach to investigate non-sustainable civilisation–nature interactions in the context of global change. The approach rests on the decomposition of intricate dynamics of Global Change into problematic patterns civilisation nature interactions (`syndromes') this is done by an iterative process of observations, data and theoretical system analysis and GIS-based modelling attempts. These syndromes of global change characterise endangering and risky developments of civilisation nature interaction and represent a baseline for measuring and indicating `non-sustainability'; in order to have a sustainable development it is necessary to have a far-reaching absence of syndromes. They encompass the core problems of global change, e.g. soil degradation, climate change, threats to biodiversity or global deforestation. Patterns are defined as characteristic constellations of global change trends (`symptoms'). Cause–effect schemes of symptoms and their interrelations are constituted as complex phenomena resulting from interactions over the different spheres of the Earth system (biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, population, pedosphere, economy, psychosocial sphere, social organisation, science and technology). The approach is illustrated by an analysis of civilisation–nature interaction patterns relevant for global deforestation. Global forest ecosystems have been chosen for this investigation because of their important role in the global carbon cycle and their importance for biological diversity. The resulting geographical patchwork of the combined dispositions and intensities of the different syndromes describes current and future regional threats to forests by their underlying global cause–effect patterns of civilisation–nature interaction.
Summary
This is article is about an attempt to quantify the threat to the worlds forests due to human activity using fuzzy logic and GIS. The researchers claim that the earth has lost 60% of its traditional forest land due to human development, and they have looked at the historical causes, and attempted to generalize them into categories that can be modeled mathematically. The goal is to quantify the threats to forest land, so that if certain parameters about an area are known, then the threat of deforestation can be calculated using their algorithm. GIS ties into their work because it gives them a way to run their algorithm, and to show graphically the perceived risk levels on a global scale.
They first begin by trying to quantify human effects on “global change”. They have identified 16 different syndromes that are meant to break down global change into systematic generalized principles. These include things like “dust bowl” syndrome, which they define as“the non sustainable uses of soil and water”, and “smoke stack syndrome” which is defined as “environmental degradation through large scale diffusion of long-lived substances”. Other syndromes describe things like government corruption and exploitation of resources.
Once global change is broken down into these categories that lead to non-sustainable development, they then use mathematics to try and quantify what what risk each category poses to forests, and what relationships the categories have to each other. Once they had a model that could calculate the perceived threats, they used GIS to work with real world data, mostly at the country level, to calculate the threat to forests on a global scale. They used GIS to map out the current threat level, both for the individual syndromes, and the overall threat to forests. They did further analysis to identify what forests are likely to become threatened in the future. They came up with further equations to identify factors that could lead to the development of syndromes in the future and ran further calculations.
The researchers attempted to use their results to support theories about the global carbon cycle. In addition to helping to identify threats to forests, the researchers hoped to develop a model for further uses of GIS in similar situations to help study other global resource cycles.