Sustainable Economies
For truly sustainable development, the environment needs to be both healthy and wealth producing. There are many issues that need to be addressed; the current focus of CEH addresses some specific concerns where we have relevant expertise.
Energy requirements must be met increasingly from renewable sources and we need to know where we should place renewable energy schemes to give maximum output with minimum adverse impact on the environment. Land use also has very strong impacts on environmental change and is driven by social and economic influences as well as UK or European political or policy changes. Many natural processes and all human activities generate hazards and benefits. We need improved knowledge of pollutant impacts, flood frequency and uncertainty, sustainable water supplies and droughts, and environmental variables. We need to find better ways of resolving the conflicts that arise from differing human uses of natural resources.
CEH has extensive expertise in monitoring the pollution of air, water soils and living organisms. We are renowned for our nationwide long-term monitoring programmes and databases, which identify changes in the frequency of plant and animal species, and the richness of their communities. We are working on better ways of estimating chemical, ecological and hydrological hazards, and development of mitigating measures.
Focus
We are developing capacities to measure, diagnose, understand, predict and monitor the ways in which sudden and gradual change affects the sustainability of the environment.
Currently we are focusing on the:
- Nature, causes and dynamics of land-use change.
- Resolution of conflicts arising from the exploitation of natural resources.
- Environmental aspects of the development and use of existing and new technologies, eg energy systems and biotechnology.
- Threats to people and ecosystems posed by natural hazards.
- Hazards, risks and opportunities arising from the production, use and release of chemicals and new technologies.
- Flows of energy and materials through open systems (such as rivers), driven and controlled by human activities and environmental processes.