Use of Landscape Sciences for the Assessment of Environmental Security

The assessment of land use and land cover is an important activity for cont- porary land management. Human land-use practices are the most significant factors influencing environmental management at local, regional, national, and global scales. In the past, environmental policies have often reflected a reactive response to environmental perturbations with management efforts focused on short-term, local-scale problems such as pollutant abatement. Currently, environmental management philosophy is evolving toward examination of critical environmental problems over larger spatial scales and assessment of the cumulative risk resulting from multiple problem sources. Todays environmental managers, urban planners, and decision-makers are increasingly expected to examine environmental and economic problems in a larger geographic context that crosses national boundaries and scientific disciplines. Secondly, cont- porary policy-makers have also been challenged on how they view security. The conventional definition of national security has been expanded to include environmental threats resulting from resource scarcity and overpopulation and it is recognized that environmental factors may have an impact in creating conflict and world instability. Thus the working definition of security has been broadened beyond relying on militaristic aspects alone and has evolved to include the environment. In 1969, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established the Committee on the Challenges of Modern Society (CCMS) partly in response to examine the link between environmental issues and security. CCMS was created for the purpose of addressing problems affecting the environment of the member nations and the quality of life of their citizens.