The world is now so tied together by flows of energy, information, and commodities, that action in one part of it is likely to have implications for many other parts. Numerous biological resources — particularly wildlife and forests — are being depleted more by foreign demand than by direct local consumption. Money earned by depleting resources is then often invested in imported industrial products, which themselves may have had negative environmental impacts in the country of their production. As examples we may cite certain pesticides which, on being banned in the countries of their production, are exported to others.

A major reason for establishment of parks and reserves is to provide secure areas for long-term studies on the biophysical components of The Biosphere. Research, therefore, should be seen as a legitimate and essential, indeed routine, activity in most protected areas, and particularly in the biologically rich reserves in the tropical countries. But, as with any other use, research needs to be planned and the execution of its results effectively managed. Protected-area management authorities must accordingly have a clear policy of what research they will actively encourage and how to ensure that the results are applicable by management. This paper reviews the range of research topics for which tropical protected areas provide opportunities, and suggests some guidelines on how the protected-areas management authority can most effectively direct and utilize the results of research programmes.

Forest resources in tropical Asia are purportedly destroyed by shifting cultivators and spontaneous settlers as well as farmers in planned settlements for the purposes of expansion of agricultural land, land speculation, commercial crop cultivation, livestock ranching, logging, and manufacturing of paper and various industrial goods.

The natural environments of the South Pacific islands are degrading rapidly. The region suffers one of the highest rates of species extinction in the world, and has probably the world's highest proportion of endangered species per unit land-area. Most island ecosystems in the South Pacific are totally unprotected, and many are rapidly diminishing in area or at least deteriorating in quality. The practice of conservation through conventional forms of protected areas has been ineffective in Pacific countries, having been applied in ignorance or denial of traditional practices or tenurial arrangements when such traditional patterns are often crucial to the maintenance of South Pacific cultures. Only approaches to conservation which embrace the multiple and subsistence uses of natural resources by island communities are having success.

Most marine ecosystems present priorities for conservation which are different from, but no less urgent than, those of terrestrial systems. These priorities relate to understanding and regulating human use and impact within the large scale, and the high but variable degree of connectivity of marine systems. The identification and preservation of remnant examples of marine ecosystems, otherwise destroyed by human activity, is generally less of an issue than it is for terrestrial conservation. As a consequence, the needs of marine conservation are not readily addressed by models developed for terrestrial ecosystems, which are based on excluding or severely limiting human access in managed areas. An exception is the philosophy of the Biosphere Reserve, developed as part of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Programme. This appears particularly appropriate to marine environments, as it focuses on managing human activities and impacts within the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem.

As a poor, developing country, Egypt faces a wide variety of pollution and other environmental problems associated with poverty. In this essay are reviewed the most severe environmental problems currently facing Egypt, as well as the range of policies which the government has assayed in order to manage them. Some of the widespread environmental problems are growing acute. Water pollution is seen as serious, and many new factories are being built without sufficient pollution control. There are real threats to agricultural productivity and public health. While many new institutional and legal steps have been undertaken in the last 7 years, most have failed to curb effectively mounting environmental stresses in the country. A rare counter-example is Mediterranean water quality, which is being helped by activation of UNEP's Mediterranean Action Plan.

There is mounting evidence of global climate change. Analysis of near-surface temperatures over land and oceans during the past 130 years shows marked warming during the first half of this century, with relatively steady temperatures thereafter to the mid-1970s and rapid warming occurring during the 1980s. Of further significance is the fact that the warmest decade in the record is that of the 1980s, with some of the most pronounced warming occurring in the lower latitudes which include the wider Caribbean region. In the context of this study, the important consequences of this warming are the potential impacts associated with rising sea-level and the increased frequency, intensity, and seasonality, of tropical storms due to thermal expansion of the oceans, melting of land-based ice-sheets and glaciers, and local geological parameters. Within the wider Caribbean, rates of relative sea-level rise have been recently estimated at around 2.5 mm/yr. Also, meteorological changes are evident with the occurrence of unusually intense storms such as Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. Rising sea-level coupled with meteorological changes present the potential for increased coastal erosion, loss of wetlands, disappearance of special habitats such as mangroves, and destruction of coral-reef communities. These potential impacts may have a significant influence on future land-use and development practices that could alter the economic growth and development of the region not least through curtailment of tourism.

The nature of the moorlands of England and Wales is described and a brief outline of their postglacial ecological history is propounded. Emphasis then switches to a particularly critical phase in this evolution, namely the later centuries of the Mesolithic period of the mid-Holocene, when the human groups of the period employed fire as a management tool for vegetation.