Impact and Response of the Third Driving Force in the Estuary System: A Case Study of the Changjiang (Yangtze) Estuary

摘要

Human activity impacts on the earth system in a scale from local, regional to global, which has been called as the third driving force of earth system. As an integrated complexity, the estuary system could be sensitive to both global changes and integrated natural and anthropogenic variations within the river watershed. More and more estuarine processes have been and will be controlled by the third driving force with an increasing intensity of resource exploitation and human-controlling in the estuary and watershed. Consequently, the healthy development of estuary system will be one of the most important theoretical and practical problems. As a case study of the Changjiang Estuary, the natural evolution with natural adjustment, developing human-control activities, reasonable or sustainable exploitation of natural resources and some suspensive problems are discussed, and some suggestions for harmonious consistency of nature with human being are supposed in the present paper.