All publications and documents

Understanding Risk addresses a central dilemma of risk decisionmaking in a democracy: detailed scientific and technical information is essential for making decisions, but the people who make and live with those decisions are not scientists. The key task of risk characterization is to provide needed and appropriate information to decisionmakers and the public. This important new volume illustrates…

Will major global environmental change take place in the 21st century? How much is known about the change? Can we find out more? Must we take it seriously? Should we do something now, or can we wait a decade or so? This book seeks to answer these questions. Scientists are reaching consensus that rates of change in many of the environmental indicators are already increasing in some…

Land degradation and desertification has always been a high priority for the SADC member States for they affect food production. On the road leading to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, SADC-ELMS sensitised, adviced and worked closely with member states to assist them to produce the national UNCED reports. It also produced the regional reports, Sustaining Our Common Future which became part of Agenda 21…

Desertification is a global problem threatens over 250 million people living in dryland regions that cover approximately 35 million km2 in nearly 100 countries. Only recently has global climate change received increasing attention as a major factor that contributes to desertification. At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, the effect of…

The Symposium was significant in producing by consensus a Statement of Principles, reproduced below, that sets a framework for action to prevent and mitigate environmentally induced population displacement and to address the negative environmental consequences of mass migration.In all discussion sessions and presentations, environmental destruction was consistently analysed in its wider socio…

At the first Conference of the Parties of the Climate Convention in Berlin in Spring 1995 it became evident once again: To counteract anthropogenic climate changes, individuals as well as societies have to change their way of thinking and behavior. This accounts for other areas of global environmental change as well. Global trends like soil degradation, loss of biological diversity, water…