The UnQuanifiable Environment

Question Posed By: Douglas Britz, Johannesburg South Africa

Question: Is the Environment Quatifiable?

Answer: No; no completely. There are to many slight influncing factors for each item in the environment. the environment is unquantifiable and thus one needs to manage that accordingly. Its called cummulative environmental management which takes into mind all the different aspects and risks associated with the environment to be able to manage it effectively.Its like controlling the climate one cant do that. One also cant control / manage the ... Read moreenvironment so this is why we have to have standerdised systems to achieve maximum and effective management in a state of continuous chaos. Its based on Fuzzy logic and the Chaos theory of mathamatics and statistics.

Douglas Britz:. i agree with everything above (for it is what i basically said ...) except for one thing the environment is quantifiable, we may not be able to detect everything but classification is possible.

Couple of Extracts from a couple of Journal Articals:.

Environment, security and the question of quantification - Joseph Alcamo.

The link between environmental change and human security brings together two important issues having to do with nature and society. In the last ten years, great progress has been made in understanding this link, but this new knowledge has been mostly in a descriptive and qualitative form. But now there are some compelling reasons to move from qualitative to quantitative analysis. Quantifying this issue could help researchers to better understand the historical record of environmental change and security threats. It could also help to harmonise the assessment of different global environmental threats, and provide a quantitative foundation to future scenarios of the impact of environmental change on human security. To carry out this quantification, at least three measures of environmental change and human security need to be elaborated:''environmental stress'',''state susceptibility'', and''crisis''. The concept of''transient environmental stress''is introduced to describe an undesirable short-term departure from''normal''conditions. The concept''state susceptibility''(in the context of environment and security) is suggested as the degree to which a state can resist and recover from crisis brought on by environmental stress; and''crisis''is defined as an unstable time. brought on by environmental stress that requires extraordinary emergency measures to counteract. Various methods are possible for quantifying these measures. For example, for transient environmental stress, newly developed global environmental models can be used. For state susceptibility, it may be possible to build on existing quantitative indices of political capacity and the level of democracy. For quantifying the occurrence of crises, researchers may be able to draw on various compilations of disasters and related events. Finally, a method called a''security diagram''is suggested for tying all of these measures together quantitatively. This and other methods may prove to be successful in quantifying the concept of environmental security, if the methodological challenges can be overcome.

http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=1551&prevQuery=&ps=10&m=or

http://www.apsnet.org/pd/PDFS/1985/PlantDisease69n06_461.PDF.

Not only in doing environmental management do we deal with the environment but people and sustainablity of the future environment and the human being and culture is so unique and complex that those too are completely un quantifiable.

Increasingly, environmental agencies are engaged in public participation activities. Unfortunately, the limited evaluation of public participation programmes also makes improvement of such programmes more difficult. To encourage further thinking about the evaluation of environmental public participation programmes, this article discusses some of the basic issues raised by evaluators of social programmes (e.g. unemployment and housing, etc.) that have served as methodological proving grounds for evaluation. These issues include why evaluate and what and how to evaluate, as well as questions concerning the role of evaluators. To illustrate ways in which evaluators of environmental public participation programmes have grappled with these issues, examples of different methodological approaches are included. Finally, based on this review, recommendations are made to improve evaluations of environmental public participation programmes, such as increasing evaluation aimed at making mid-course corrections, which includes involving participants in evaluation and assessing a variety of participatory goals.