Population pressures are major sources of environmental degradation. Population numbers, fertility rates, and the age composition of populations, interact with natural resources, ecological processes, and life-support systems.

Deforestation of the tropical moist forests is taking place at an alarming pace; some experts believe that the entire ecobiome will be virtually destroyed within the next ten years. Although the ultimate ecological effects of tropical deforestation remain controversial, our present scientific understanding is adequate to justify efforts to slow the deforestation trend. The impacts that this trend will probably have on global climate remain unclear, while the effects that it will have on biodiversity will clearly be disastrous. This suggests that the research community should place a high priority on applying data on refugia (documented sites of high endemism and species-richness) to conservation planning, and on investigating the probable combined effects of climatic change and habitat fragmentation on world biodiversity.

The world is now so tied together by flows of energy, information, and commodities, that action in one part of it is likely to have implications for many other parts. Numerous biological resources — particularly wildlife and forests — are being depleted more by foreign demand than by direct local consumption. Money earned by depleting resources is then often invested in imported industrial products, which themselves may have had negative environmental impacts in the country of their production. As examples we may cite certain pesticides which, on being banned in the countries of their production, are exported to others.

Examination of the often contradictory estimates of the rate and extent of deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia leads to a ‘best estimate’ of the cumulative area of forest cleared through 1988 as 345 × 103 km2 (including old clearings), or 8.2% of the 4 × 106 km2 forested portion of Brasil's 5 × 106 km2 ‘Legal Amazon’ region.

A major reason for establishment of parks and reserves is to provide secure areas for long-term studies on the biophysical components of The Biosphere. Research, therefore, should be seen as a legitimate and essential, indeed routine, activity in most protected areas, and particularly in the biologically rich reserves in the tropical countries. But, as with any other use, research needs to be planned and the execution of its results effectively managed. Protected-area management authorities must accordingly have a clear policy of what research they will actively encourage and how to ensure that the results are applicable by management. This paper reviews the range of research topics for which tropical protected areas provide opportunities, and suggests some guidelines on how the protected-areas management authority can most effectively direct and utilize the results of research programmes.

Among the prerequisites to building an effective environmental institutional framework for the twenty-first century, our current thinking singles out the following eight for prior consideration:

1) Improvement of coordination — after due strengthening where necessary — of the existing global monitoring and environmental assessment facilities both within and outside the United Nations system.