Use of Landscape Sciences for the Assessment of Environmental Security

This book focuses on the relationship between environmental security and landscape assessment. It is the fruit of experiences incubated during the last five years in the context of the Pilot Study Project on Use of Landscape Sciences for Environmental Assessment sponsored by the NATO Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society. The growing knowledge about environmental change, stress, and degradation has increased the visibility of environmental condition as an important determinant of security. The relationship between environment and security now is a common interest among both the scientific and policy-making communities, supported by the fand political sovereignty have been revisited following the changes in the act that the traditional security concepts based on territorial integrity geopolitical landscape at the end of the last century. In this volume, environmental security is described from the viewpoint of landscape sciences. This approach is particularly suitable because landscapes are comprised of the abiotic and biotic ecological structures and processes of an area and their interrelations with the socio-economic component. Written in an accessible style, this book discusses the concept of environmental security from subjective and objective perspectives using different approaches and tools typical of landscape assessment.