Environmental Threats and Opportunities What are the greatest threats that humanity will encounter as it attempts to navigate the transition to sustainability? What are the most promising opportunities for avoiding or circumventing these threats on the path to sustainability? 2 Main Questions: By Natalie Zaczek 2005

Conceptual Issues Difficulty in the analysis arises because hazards have spatial (x) and temporal (t) dimensions and important interactions Local changes can lead to regional and global changes 1) - affect the ability of multiple sectors of almost any society to move ahead toward our normative goals for sustainability 2) - have cumulative or delayed consequences, with effects felt over a long time 3) - are irreversible or difficult to change 4) - have a notable potential to interact with each other to damage earth's support systems

Environmental Perspectives, Industry & Energy FIVE categories *Land and water pollution *Air pollution *Contaminants of the human environment *Resource losses *Natural disasters Water and Air pollution top priorities Ozone depletion and climate change (priorities for industrialized nations) market incentives will induce the adoption of cleaner technologies

Interaction Perspectives *Research support and political action remain largely confined within the narrow categories of traditional thinking. *Conflicts over water rights are sources of continuing social and economic stress *Need an approach that tracks all substances put into the air *Need to account for processing *Multiple and interacting effects on multiple situations Water Atmosphere and Climate

Conclusion *Most significant threats to it are likely to be the cumulative, interactive consequences of activities across a number of sectors *To emphasize our beliefs that attention to scale matters in efforts to promote a sustainability transition * Over longer time periods, unmitigated expansion of even these individual problems could certainly pose serious threats to people and the planet's life support systems.