Increasing recognition that the overall goals of environmental conservation and economic development are not conflicting but can be mutually reinforcing, has prompted calls for ‘environmentally sustainable’ economic development. Although there are difficulties in defining sustainable development in an analytically rigorous way, there is still a need to evolve a concept of sustainability that both distinguishes it from other post-war meanings of development and is useful for practical analysis and policymaking.

The National Conservation Strategy for Australia (NCSA, 1983) provides Australia with nationally agreed guidelines for the use of her living resources. It orginated from the World Conservation Strategy (WCS, 1980) and was developed through a process of public discussion which is described in this paper. A Steering Committee was established to oversee the development of the Strategy and guide a task-force. Conservation, industry, scientific, and government, interests were all represented throughout the development of the Strategy.

The Country Parks programme in Hong Kong has been overwhelmingly successful in generating outdoor recreational demands. Most visitors concentrate in designated barbeque-picnic sites of which many have been badly damaged by intensive recreational use. The conditions in 60 sites in a popular Country Park were evaluated by allocating ordinal ratings to 20 soil-erosion and site-attractiveness indicators. Index sites representing three levels of impacts were studied in detail for specific changes in vegetation and soil that had been induced by trampling. The magnitude of site degradation was indicated by the relative proportions of vegetation, organic litter, and bare ground, covers. The conversion from vegetation to litter was faster than that of litter to bare soil initially, but the converse is true at advanced stages of degradation. Seven out of fourteen site-attractiveness attributes, including accessibility, facility provision, shape, stocking rate and distribution pattern of facilities, on-site naturalness, and scenic diversity, were associated with erosion–in most cases positively.

Relationships between sedimentation, submergence, and deterioration, of a Mississippi River deltaic-plain coastal wetland forest were investigated. Measured sedimentation rates (0.63 ± 0.35 cm per yr) as determined by 137Cs-dating were considerably less than the rapid increase in water-level (c. 1.36 cm per yr). Transplanted seedlings of Quercus lyrata (Overcup Oak) and of Taxodium distichum (Bald Cypress) survived only on the most elevated natural ridge in this swamp-forest.

In November 1983, the construction of the first part of an assembling plant of jackets to support oil-drilling platforms began at Punta Banda estuary, a 16.40 km2 coastal estuary located 150 km south of the USA-México border. The area that is being built on (0.45 km2) is located at the south-west corner of the estuary and is delimited by a dike. The second part of the construction, covering a further 0.40 km2, will extend to the south-east and will require some deflection of the main circulation channel.

The rocky shore of central Chile is heavily harvested by mariscadores de orilla and skin-divers, but their catches are not considered in the fishery statistics. The aim of the present paper is to estimate the intensity of human predation and annual catch of each of the species taken at Las Cruces, Central Chile. The activity pattern of both categories of collectors demonstrate a temporal grouping. The observation of mariscadores de orilla and skin-divers in 3 sectors of fringe totalling 1,500 m of rocky shore during 12 months allowed us to estimate the annual catch per species caught (kg per year).

This paper examined the relationship between economic development and threats to national parks. Many Authors have suggested that the type and intensity of threats to parks may be influenced by the socio-economic characteristics of the region where the park is located. This idea was tested, using a stratified sample (N=135) of the world's national parks, with data derived from a survey of park managers.

Sand-dune fixation is an important step in the struggle against desertification, which latter is gaining strength in Somalia. The objective is not only to fight erosion and to stabilize the dunes, but also to raise some revenue for residents through reafforestation and agricultural schemes.