Seeking Sustainability in an Age of Complexity

This book reflects the current shift in thinking about environmental issues, away from reductionism and towards synthetic approaches that are based on complex systems and emergent properties. The book revolves around the discussion of a number of environmental themes, including ecology, hydrology, global change, landscapes, and land use. The common theme are the concepts of complexity and the local interactions of autonomous agents. The book also discusses a wide range of environmental modelling approaches, including issues such as uncertainty, limitations, equifinality, and the limits to data. Seeking Sustainability in an Age of Complexity shows that if data are collected or aggregated at an inappropriate scale, then the true underlying processes may be masked and incorrect models may then be formulated. Scales of analysis need to be appropriate to the processes under consideration. The artificial aggregation of data to exclude noise may in practice hide the process of interest.