Global change-human interactions: a multivariate assessment framework

Abstract

The authors present a basic multivariate framework for assessing the interactions between human activities and environmental processes that illustrates the range of potential nonlinearities, feedbacks, and synergisms and some of the possible analytic complexities. They suggest that as the scientific community is increasingly called on not just to diagnose specific environmental problems but also to explore policy options and other management issues, much greater emphasis will be placed on quantitative assessment of the larger question of management of the global environment. It is in this relatively unexplored arena that the authors foresee many opportunities for multidisciplinary, multivariate assessments that would undoubtedly benefit from advances in supercomputing technologies.<>