Multi-dimensional Global Change (Wiley-Praxis Series in Remote Sensing) - Tapa dura

Multidimensional Global Change Kirill Ya Kondratyev Forty years of technological progress have had a catastrophic impact on the environment, since this progress has been based on the ruthless exploitation of natural resources: 20 percent of the fertile soil on cultivated land has been lost; 20 per cent of tropical forests have been cleared; desertification continues at a rate of 6 million hectares annually; and deforestation amounts to 11 million hectares annually. Economic estimations practically never take into account this depletion and damage to natural resources, the harmful effect on human health, the deprivation of future generations of those natural resources, and the long-term impact in the form of biospheric deformation. In this text Kirill Kondratyev emphasises the extremely complex and interdisciplinary nature of multidimensional global change, highlighting its principal aspects and many practical consequences (economic, social, etc.), as well as the relationships between environmental problems on global, continental and national scales. He demonstrates that the main limiting factor of further quantitative development of humankind is the available biosphere resources and that the basic criterion of ecological well- (or ill-) being is the level of depletion of these resources. The author highlights an acute social controversy of the modern world in that the level of biospheric resource consumption in industrially-developed countries exceeds by far that in the Third World. This disparity could be eliminated through advancements such as the 'decarbonisation' of energy production, and the development of new technologies. However, he shows that radical improvement of the situation can only be achieved by reducing the population number and establishing a new, fair economic order. He emphasises that when considering global change problems it is important to avoid exaggerations, and he strikes a balance between the most gloomy predictions and more encouraging estimations. Readership: Professional scientists, environmentalists and engineers concerned with research relating to global change and its consequences, managers and senior engineers wishing to gain an insight into the problems caused by global change, and undergraduate and postgraduate students of geography, meteorology, climatology, atmospheric physics and environmental science.

Kirill Yakovlevich Kondratyev is a Counsellor of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the Research Centre for Ecological Safety in St Petersburg, and Co-Chairman of the Board of the Nansen International Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre. He is recognised as one of the world's leading scientists in the field of atmospheric research and environmental science. He has received numerous international honours and awards and is the author of over 1000 scientific papers and more than 100 research-orientated texts. He is a member of the editorial boards of several international scientific journals, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Earth Observation and Remote Sensing.