Human environment interaction

Throughout history, the establishment, development, interaction and migration of civilizations have been significantly shaped by availability of appropriate climate and natural resources. However, since the industrial revolution human societies increasingly impact and – in many cases – effectively dominate (and often diminish) capacities of the Earth System to regulate climate, biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity in ways that are essential to human life itself. This has recently raised considerable concerns relating to sustainable use and conservation of natural resources. These can be attributed to: (i) insufficient understanding of essential ecological processes acting across multiple time- and spatial scales – which can result in a disparity between those scales of ecological processes and scales of human resource use; and (ii) the fact that human behaviour is traditionally based on narrow and conflicting short-term interests and goals, resulting (inter alia) in high discount rates for future environmental costs and temporal mismatches and disruptions between ecological, social and economic processes. Human societies and their constitutive economic, legal and political institutions drive (both directly and indirectly) changes in our environment and the crucial ecological services that we depend upon. However, the linkages and feedback mechanisms are not always well defined.

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Projects

An Investigation into the Cascade Effect of Mergers on the Global Financial Markets

Seth Bullock, Antonella Ianni (Investigators), Camillia Zedan

An investigation into the external effects that horizontal mergers have on the interconnected global markets.

Operational Simulation of the Solent Search-and-Rescue environment

James Scanlan, Kenji Takeda, Hans Fangohr (Investigators), Ben Schumann

This project aims to identify useful metrics for a proposed Search-and-Rescue UAV and test it virtually in a realistic environment.

Simulating Hydro-geomorphic Changes in European Climate Hotspots

John Dearing (Investigator), Ying Wang

This project will simulate the behaviour of hydro-geomorphological processes in a fluvial system over decadal timescales is an important basis for research on catchment environmental management, especially with regards climate changes and human impacts on fluvial system.