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The major challenge in attaining a sustainable future for humanity lies in accelerating development of well-integrated, problem solving, and policy-orientated environmental science. The recent global increase of environmental degradation has come from exploitative resource use and mismanagement, as well as the domination of economic activity in the management and funding of science. The problems have been further exacerbated by limited communication among professional disciplines and consequent lack of knowledge transfer. One ultimate effect has been lack of basic understanding of the great complexity of interactions between hydrological and ecological processes and their socioeconomic backgrounds. That is why we suffer from increasing costs of maintaining infrastructures and environmental management, and ‘overengineering’ of the environment. If ‘business as usual’ is maintained, we can expect that soon the biosphere will no longer support a declining global carrying capacity, threatening global conflicts. Major drivers of biogeosphere evolution and function have been the cycles of water and nutrients in a complex array of differing climates and catchment geomorphologies. In the face of global climate change and unequally distributed human populations, the principles of ecohydrology should be the bases for further integration of ecology, hydrology, engineering, biotechnology and other environmental sciences. Examples are introduced to show how the integration of these will not only increase efficiency of measures to harmonize ecosystem potentials with societal needs, but also significantly reduce the costs of sustainable environmental management. |
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