case studies
Assignment
Title: Maintaining Biodiversity
Introduction
Environmental science combines our efforts to use science to understand environmental problems and to use this information to make sound decisions. The case study presented here involves a wide range of information on Costa Rica including its natural, cultural and economic resources. Any environmental decision must be culturally acceptable, economically viable and ecologically sustainable. In this exercise, we will simplify three aspects of the problem and use the views that we have developed in the previous case studies. The actual process of guiding a country to a more sustainable future is highly complicated and difficult, but this case study should show how the following multiple views are helpful.
Systems view - Deforestation and population growth is a common problem similar to the loss of farm land to urbanization that we explored in the Unit 1 application assignment. In this case, the forests are in double jepordy, as population grows there is more demand for land to be used as farms or cities. You will need to look for information in the case study reading that will support the problem of a positive feedback for deforestation, and what Costa Rica did that slowed and actually reversed this trend.
Network view - Costa Rica was one of the first governments to talk about sustainability. They put this talk into action in several ways, one of which was to create reserves for their natural resources. They created these reserves in a very interesting way; the let the local regions develop independent plans for each reserve thus creating a diversity of approaches to saving biodiversity. The combination of national parks, cultural land and other land holdings that have been set aside counts for 28% of the total area of the nation. This allows a high level of connectivity between the reserve areas without over connection. The value of a mosaic of land uses can be appreciated by a more specific treatment of the network view, that focuses on intermediate levels of landscape connectivity.
Strategic choices - Costa Rica was faced with essentially the same future as many other countries. At one time they were the biggest beef producer in Central America, but they saw that this was probably an unsustainable path. They had an array of choices but packaged them in a manner that avoiding deforestation (with the loss of revenue), protecting biodiversity and ecotourism were all linked. Their selection of a strategy avoided the cerrtain losses that could be associated with simpler, one track conservationist or preservationist strategies. The strategic choice can be visualized as a variation of a game against nature that we examined in the Unit 3 case study and application.
Resources
The reading for this case study is:
This assignment will use three views of this information
systems view of deforestation
network view of reserves
with a special addition viewing the connectivity of a landscape
games view of the decisions that Costa Rica made
Assignment
The assignment will be given in class.
References