There is no doubt that today, perhaps more than ever before, humanity faces a myriad of complex and demanding challenges. These include natural resource depletion and environmental degradation, food and water insecurity, energy shortages, diminishing biodiversity, increasing losses from natural disasters, and climate change with its associated potentially devastating consequences, such as rising sea levels.
These human-induced and natural impacts on the environment need to be well understood in order to develop informed policies, decisions, and remedial...