Year: 1980
Type: article
Abstract: Present environmental legislation has forced government agencies to assess the full impact of their projects and provide citizens a forum to express their opinions on any proposed actions. This assumes, however, the existence of a rational planning and evaluation process, supported by adequate knowledge and information of the impacts under study. While site-specific analyses have received much attention, regional environmental analysis has often proceeded on an ad hoc basis. The lack of a basic design for regional environmental analysis has hindered the development of an integrative approach to large-scale problems. The development of a theoretical framework which provides the minimal description of system dynamics, sufficient to address conflicts at the regional scale, represents a basic challenge for regional analysis. In this paper we suggest such a framework in the form of a minimal set of state descriptors. We also examine a regional problem, presented as a heuristic device, to test whether the proposed framework is sufficient to address the dynamics of regional conflicts.
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W24860091