ISBN 92-808-1027-8 2001, Paper; US$39.95

"This volume tackles an incredibly compli- cated topic from a number of disciplinary, philosophical, and methodological perspectives in an integrated manner." "...the book serves as an excellent reference source..." "...a compelling call for broader and more integrated approaches to address the uncertainty and complexity of global environmental risk in the context of social change, different cultural traditions, and democratic visions of the future." Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Vol. 93, March 2003, No. 1)

Despite international initiatives such as the Earth Summit in 1992 and ongoing efforts to implement the Kyoto Protocol, human activities continue to register a destructive toll on the planetary environment. At root, research on global environmental risk seeks new pathways for reversing unsustainable trends, curtailing ongoing destructive activities, and creating a life-sustaining planet. This book takes stocks of the distinctive challenges posed by global environmental risks, the capacity of knowledge systems to identify and characterize such risks, and the competence of human society to manage the unprecedented complexity. Particular attention trains on engaging, in ways conducive to enhancing social learning and adaptation, the large uncertainties inherent in these risks.

Various chapters enlist different scales of analysis to explore the manifestation and causes of global environmental risks in all the diversity of their regional expression. Throughout, the editors and contributors accord prominence to the vulnerability of people and places to environmental degradation. Understanding vulnerability is a neglected key to assessing the nature of the risks and determining strategies for altering trajectories of threat. Global risk futures, the editors argue, are not intractable, and are still amenable to a risk-analysis senterprise that is democratic in principle, humanistic in concept, and geared to the realities that pertain in the particular societies, locales, and regions that will ultimately bear the risk.

Jeanne X. Kasperson, Research Associate Professor and Research Librarian at the George Perkins Marsh Institute, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, is a visiting scholar at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Roger E. Kasperson, after more than 30 years at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where he was University Professor (Government and Geography) and Director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute, has joined the Stockholm Environment Institute as its Executive Director.