Population, Consumption, and Environment: Lessons Learned and Future Research about Coastal and Marine Ecosystems

摘要

The editors of this special issue have put our minds to disentangling the complexity of the Population, Consumption, and Environment (PCE) connections, drawing conclusions about the insights from the preceding case studies, wondering about future research and policy recommendations to be generated from them, and imagining how interdisciplinary research about PCE issues is best done. Our various disciplinary perspectives and research experiences reflect the array of people included among the case studies' research teams. What follows is a sampling of our discussions. Much of the material comes form a roundtable discussion held on 28 February, 2002, at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. We begin with Anuradha Kumar's description of the MacArthur Foundation's PCE initiative and goals, and combine it with comments from others about how difficult it is to conduct interdisciplinary research. From there we move to discussing why coastal and marine ecosystems are challenging sites for research and policy, but are very important foci of future work. Finally, we discuss the conceptual issues of grappling with population, consumption, and environment. We conclude with a modest set of policy recommendations.