Risk and Criticality: Trajectories of Regional Environmental Degradation

This chapter focuses on an international project centred at Clark University in the US that has explored the causes and consequences of growing environmental risk over a 50to 70-year period in nine regions distributed throughout the world. In its influential report, the World Commission on Environment and Development called for a global risk-assessment programme to buttress and extend the work of the United Nations Environment Programme. The causes and consequences of human-induced environmental degradation are concentrated in regions and places distributed throughout the planet where they threaten life-support systems and the well-being of current and future generations. The Project on Critical Environmental Zones, an international and interdisciplinary effort centred at Clark University in the US, took up this very problem. Amazonia encompasses the Brazilian section of the Amazon River’s drainage basin, the world’s largest continuous expanse of the tropical forest.