This book is the first comprehensive history of international efforts to protect the ozone layer, the greatest success yet achieved in managing human impacts on the global environment. Its arguments about how this success was achieved are both theoretically novel and of great significance for the management of other global problems, particularly global climate change. The book provides an account of the ozone-depletion issues from the first attempts to develop international action in the 1970s to the mature functioning of the present international regime. It examines the parallel developments...

Developed after a meeting at the Santa Fe Institute on extinction modeling, this book comments critically on the various modeling approaches. In the last decade or so, scientists have started to examine a new approach to the patterns of evolution and extinction in the fossil record. This approach may be called "statistical paleontology," since it looks at large-scale patterns in the record and attempts to understand and model their average statistical features, rather than their detailed structure. Examples of the patterns these studies examine are the distribution of the sizes of mass...

Currently there is great concern about over-fishing and the effects of fisheries on other marine organisms. This book addresses ecological and environmental issues associated with responsible and sustainable marine fisheries. It includes 20 chapters developed from an international conference and concurrent symposium held in Iceland in October 2001. Contributors include leading international authorities from around the world. Contents include: global overview of marine capture fisheries, legal protection for marine ecosystems, dynamics of marine ecosystems, the role of man in marine...

Foreword Over the past decades, Piero Risoluti has built up an intimate knowl edge of the nuclear industry - in particular of nuclear waste man agement. In this book, his scientific understanding is apparent - for example in his comprehensive but readily understandable descrip tions of waste conditioning and disposal. Moreover, he has also been directly involved in the wider societal and political debates in the nuclear area - especially in his Italian homeland. What shines through in these pages is.his frustration at the lack of progress in im plementing disposal concepts that are judged by...

The most important processes on the Earths surface occur in the Ocean where materials and energy are primarily exchanged. In the case of marine chemistry different fields of chemistry from organic to inorganic as well as thermodynamics and biochemistry are involved. Analytical Chemistry is a very important tool for the quantification of biogeochemical processes by providing correct and even more sophisticated methodologies. These are often directly applied 'in situ', in order to detect trace and ultra-trace natural and anthropogenic substances. Kinetic and thermodynamic studies allow us to...

Tropical rainforests are disappearing at an alarming rate, causing unprecedented losses in biodiversity and ecosystem services. This book contributes to an improved understanding of the processes that have destabilizing effects on ecological and socio-economic systems of tropical rain forest margins, as well as striving to integrate environmental, technological and socio-economic issues in their solution.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Hybrid Systems Workshop held in Notre Dame, Indiana, USA in September 1998. The 23 revised full papers presented in the book have gone through two rounds of thorough reviewing and revision. The volume presents state-of-the-art research results and particularly addresses such areas as program verification, concurrent and distributed processes, logic programming, logics of programs, discrete event simulation, calculus of variations, optimization, differential geometry, Lie algebras, automata theory, dynamical...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference IFIP TCS 2000 held in Sendai, Japan in August 2000.The 32 revised full papers presented together with nine invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 70 submissions. The papers are organized in two tracks on algorithms, complexity, and models of computation and on logics, semantics, specification, and verification. The book is devoted to exploring new frontiers of theoretical informatics and addresses all current topics in theoretical computer science.

Three symposia on environmental geochemistry in tropical countries, held in Niter6i, Brazil (1993), in Cartagena, Colombia (1996) and in Nova Friburgo, Brazil (1999), made it very clear that tropical geochemistry is of world standard and fast increasing in multi disciplinarily and impact on important geochemical paradigms. It has additionally strong links with the economy of tropical countries, such as mining and industrialisa tion and is in full development for treating environmental problems caused by human activities of urban or industrial origin. We must compliment Prof. Jorge Abriio and...

This book is about conflicts between different stakeholder groups triggered by protected species that compete with humans for natural resources. It presents key ecological features of typical conflict species and mitigation strategies including technical mitigation and the design of participatory decision strategies involving relevant stakeholders. The book provides a European perspective, but also develops a global framework for the development of action plans.