Syndromes of Global Change: The First Panoramic View

Abstract

Ecological and environmental sciences need new approaches to meet a two-fold challenge: first, analysing the tightly coupled system of human civilisation and its natural environment and, secondly, generating action-oriented knowledge in order to deal with global change. The syndrome approach meets this challenge by formulating a set of typical problematic man-environment interaction patterns. After shortly reviewing the basic concepts of the approach, this paper presents the global distribution of seven syndromes that were present around 1990 based on 56 indicators. Besides large regions dominated by just one problematic pattern, typical "pairs" of syndromes occur, indicating mutual reinforcement mechanisms. A discussion follows covering the implication of these multiple-syndrome situations and the need for actions to mitigate global change and its negative effects.