Over five years have elapsed since the coming into force of the much heralded United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD or Convention) signed during the 'Earth Summit' at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 (CBD 1992). Despite the warm, even euphoric welcome extended to this treaty by the environmental community, the difficulties of implementing the CBD in the last five years are unmasking and uncovering its flawed environmental foundations. The language of any legal instrument embodies and expresses the considered intentions of its creators, and may contain obligatory provisions that are legally binding. They may also contain hortatory and aspirational commitments that are not legally enforceable. The CBD rejected 'hard' environmental obligations that are legally binding for non-legal exhortations, and highly qualified 'soft' commitments. Whatever their value be as face-saving strategies for reaching agreement on the CBD, such aspirational expressions do not create a stable foundation for tough decisions in the world of realpolitik.

It was just over 50 years ago that the fledgling United Nations expressed its revulsion against the German wartime atrocities, doing so by means of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNGA 1948). The 30 principles declared in 1948 were eventually solidified in 1966 via two widely-adopted international covenants (Afghanistan et al. 1966a, b). However, the need for environmental conservation was nowhere directly mentioned in any of these three landmark documents. Nonetheless, their fundamental principle that every human being has the inherent right to life (UNGA 1948, Article 3; Afghanistan et al. 1966a, Article 6.1) has been inferred to imply the need for an environment adequate for the fulfillment of that right (Westing 1993).

The Pennines are a chain of low mountains, which are often called the 'backbone of England', stretching 300 km from Ashbourne in Derbyshire almost to the Scottish border. Much of the land is over 250 m in altitude, with the highest peak, Cross Fell (893 m), being the highest peak in England outside of the Lake District National Park.

Characteristics, impacts and economic costs and benefits of blast fishing have been little investigated and they were therefore studied in Indonesia, at the scale of individual fishing households and of Indonesian society as a whole. Although illegal and highly destructive to coral reefs, blast fishing provides income and fish to a vast number of coastal fishers who claim that they have no alternative to make a living. Crew members in small-, medium- and large-scale blast fishing operations earned net incomes per month of US$55, 146 and 197 respectively. Boat owners in the same types of operations earned US$55, 393 and 1100 respectively. These incomes were comparable to the highest incomes in the conventional coastal fisheries. At the individual household level, the differences between the three types of operations show clear incentives for scale enlargement. The cost-benefit balance at the society level was calculated with an economic model. This analysis showed a net loss after 20 years of blast fishing of US$306 800 per km2 of coral reef where there is a high potential value of tourism and coastal protection, and US$33 900 per km2 of coral reef where there is a low potential value. The main quantifiable costs are through loss of the coastal protection function, foregone benefits of tourism, and foregone benefits of non-destructive fisheries. The economic costs to society are four times higher than the total net private benefits from blast fishing in areas with high potential value of tourism and coastal protection. This analysis of characteristics, impact and economics of blast fishing should help to raise the political will to ban blast fishing from Indonesian waters. Moreover, it allows for an evaluation of possible management solutions, taking into account their costs and the socio-economic framework that caused coastal fishers to start using explosives.

During the past decade, 'partnership' has become a watchword for regional environmental management (Bronars & Michaels 1997). Partnerships, in the context of environmental conservation, can be defined as collaborative efforts to achieve shared management objectives which engage, but are not limited to, non-profit groups, for-profit companies, government agencies, and landowners.

Norman Myers recently challenged scientists to consider the social responsibilities that derive from their expertise and knowledge (Myers 1999). He raised important questions regarding how pro-active scientists can or should be in leading public debate about the state of the environment. This article is a response to that call, and hopefully will serve to stimulate further debate on the topic.

Having been deeply involved with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) since it was first conceived at the World Parks Congress in Bali in 1982 (de Klemm 1984), I wish to respond to Guruswamy's (1999) critique of it.

What should be the response of environmental scientists when the world and the Earth appear to be heading toward exceptional crisis? Some scientists have signed up to public assertions that there indeed could be environmental Armageddon ahead (e.g. Union of Concerned Scientists 1992; US National Academy of Sciences and Royal Society of London 1992). Other scientists proclaim that our most valuable resource is not environmental well-being but professional credibility; the 'cry wolf' risk is the key determinant. Others appear to prefer to be scientists pure and simple, eschewing the policy arena, let alone the political scrum. Still others seem to think that warning of prospective crisis, even warning amongst themselves, is out of protocol's court.

Dearden et al . (1998) have suggested that my arguments for backing away from zealously pursuing the expansion of protected areas in Thailand (Vandergeest 1996) means giving benefits to local people with no consideration for the wider community or future generations. Let me begin my response by reminding readers of my central argument: that the driving force behind the rapid expansion of wildlife sanctuaries and national parks in Thailand was primarily the forest department's need to find new ways of controlling territory and legitimizing budget allocations, rather than nature protection per se. This bureaucratic need was the outcome of widespread occupation of reserve forests, due to both reservation of occupied areas and new migration into demarcated reserved forests, as well as the 1989 ban on legal logging in Thailand. In its rush to convert reserve forest to protected area status, the forest department demarcated as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries many areas occupied and used by local people, producing a situation in which most protected areas in Thailand are surrounded or partially occupied by an alienated local population who feel that their legitimate property rights have been appropriated. The rapid expansion of protected areas in Thailand is thus hardly something that the international conservation community should be celebrating. Nor will ongoing problems with local people be fundamentally resolved through development projects, buffer zones, and participatory conservation alone, although these kinds of projects often have important benefits. I suggested that a more appropriate direction would be to degazette and allocate to households land clearly claimed and occupied by rural households, which I estimate to be about 20% of protected areas. I also suggested that some land gazetted as protected area could be managed as common property, and that conservation could be much more aggressively pursued outside of protected areas.

Today there is much concern about the potential contamination, overuse and development of scenic rivers in more or less pristine environments. The objective of this work was to quantify the spatial and temporal changes in land-use occurring in a watershed draining a nationally protected river. The Buffalo National River of Arkansas was chosen to serve as an example of how Geographic Information System (GIS) technology can rapidly assess the environmental changes that have occurred within a watershed. GIS was used to develop a spatial database of the watershed and to describe differences in land-use data from five sample years during 1965–92. Over this time span, approximately 40 000 ha of forest were lost and converted primarily to pasture. The average rate of loss of forest was 1480 ha/yr. During this same period, the average rate of gain of pasture was 1381 ha/yr. Buffer analyses showed that pasture increased at a higher percentage rate in the buffer zones surrounding the Buffalo River than in the tributaries of the Buffalo River, and a large proportion of the increase was on higher slopes. Land-use changes were dynamic with a greater area converted to pasture than area of pasture converted to forest in the watershed. The cleared forest lands were mostly near older pastures and along streams. The reforested lands tended to occur in the more isolated areas. The Buffalo River Watershed has undergone changes in land-use that may have had impact on the water quality of the region.

The spatial requirements of populations ought to be central to developing conservation strategies and ecological theory, but they are difficult to identify from the published collection of reported population estimates. Transforming population estimates into density and log values may have clouded recognition of the discontinuous relationship that exists between abundance estimates and the areas within which they were made. I used abundance estimates of terrestrial mammalian Carnivora to identify scale domains of abundance. In scale domain A, the study areas were too small to include all the individuals of the population, and abundance estimates increased propor-tionally with study area size. Scale domain B included high variation in abundance estimates, but these estimates no longer increased with increasing size of study area as they did in domain A. I refer to the smallest area in the scale domain B as the 'threshold area' (the minimum area known to support a population of the particular species). The abundance in scale domain B averaged 52 individuals amongst all but three outlier species. Scale domains C and D were also identified, and included much larger study areas and substantially larger abundance estimates.

The threshold area is the first empirically-derived representation of the minimum space used by populations of each species. However, nearly half of all carnivore abundance estimates were made in areas smaller than the threshold area, and only 4% could be used to represent transitions between scale domains B, C and D. The remainder varied within domains B, C and D due to variation in environmental conditions and research methods. Most comparisons of density between sites and between species have been made without considering whether the estimates represented the true population or some collection of individuals more or less abundant than the population. Threshold area can be used as a standard area against which to estimate and compare population density, in lieu of more appropriately comparing estimates of region-wide density, which generally do not yet exist. Also, threshold area could be predicted with reasonable error rates based on a typical species' body mass, brain mass and home range size. Therefore, conservation biologists may now have a tool to identify the minimum habitat areas needed to conserve populations of carnivore species, and theoretical ecologists can relate ecological space at the population level to allometric variables.

Rock outcrop communities usually receive very little attention from scientists and environmentalists. We examined the vegetation occurring in eight gneiss-granite rock outcrops at Rio de Janeiro State (Brazilian Atlantic coast) which exists in natural associations on soil islands. A total of 86 vascular plant species, belonging to 30 families, was found on 347 soil islands. Bromeliaceae, Asteraceae and Velloziaceae species were the most frequent plants, many of them endemic to these habitats. Ordination and cluster analyses using species frequency on each site made evident some major distinctions related to local influences, most probably the proximity to the sea. Each outcrop presented high values of the Shannon-Wiener index of species diversity. Species richness was very dependent on the total area, and high beta diversity was observed amongst sites. Similarities with the South American and African rock-outcrop communities were found. Despite their uniqueness as habitats, their possession of several endemic species and the fragility of the ecosystem involved, Brazilian rock outcrops are not protected by specific environmental legislation and we propose urgent actions for their protection.

Despite the increasing call for cooperation amongst the states parties to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (UNTS 3069; see especially its Articles 5, 17, 18 and 20), the management of protected areas adjacent to political borders is rarely thought of as a common necessity for neighbouring countries. Setting up a zone dedicated to conservation is already a formidable challenge in the face of strongly competing interests for land. Bringing this about with two or more sovereign states sometimes seems a ‘gratuitous layer of complexity that spells almost certain failure’ (Westing 1998b). Nevertheless, transboundary protected areas are becoming increasingly common (IUCN, unpublished 1998). In fact, no less than 136 such protected area complexes involving over 406 individual protected areas and 112 different international boundaries (Zbicz & Green 1997) have been identified around the world. If proposed areas are also included, this figure can be pushed up to 200 complexes (Brunner 1998).

Many nations have recognized the need to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The scientific assessments of climate change of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) support the need to reduce GHG emissions. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the 1992 Convention on Climate Change (UNTS 30822) has now been signed by more than 65 countries, although that Protocol has not yet entered into force. Some 14 of the industrialized countries listed in the Protocol face reductions in carbon dioxide emissions of more than 10% compared to projected 1997 carbon dioxide emissions (Najam & Page 1998).

During the twentieth century the level of the Caspian Sea dropped from -26 m (1930) to -29 m (1977) below global sea level and subsequently rose again to -26.66 m in 1996. We aimed to describe responses of the vegetation in the lower Volga Delta to these substantial sea-level changes using an analysis of historic vegetation maps produced by aerial photography and satellite imagery.

The sea level drop in the earlier part of the century was followed by rapid progression of the vegetation. The subsequent rapid sea-level rise in the 1980s did however not result in similarly rapid regression of the vegetation. This partial irreversibility of the vegetation response to sea-level change is explained by the wide flooding tolerance of the major emergent species, namely Phragmites australis. Floating vegetation increased in extent, most likely due to the increased availability of more favourable conditions, particularly for Nelumbo nucifera, a tropical plant reaching its northernmost distribution in the Volga Delta. This species increased in distribution from 3.5 ha in the 1930s throughout the entire Volga Delta to several thousands of hectares in the Astrakhanskiy Biosphere Reserve alone in the 1980s. The reported sea-level changes swept the ecosystems in the Astrakhanskiy Biosphere Reserve back and forth within the Reserve boundaries. At longer time scales, ten-fold greater sea-level change has been reported. The ecosystems for which the Reserve is renowned might be pushed completely out of the Reserve under these conditions. We therefore question whether the current Reserve will be sufficiently large to guarantee conservation of the biota in the lower Volga Delta at longer time scales.

The modern era of wildlife and protected area conservation in Nepal began in 1973 with the passage of comprehensive legislation, and has evolved very quickly as new priorities and problems have emerged. Here we explore the legal and managerial development of conservation areas, a recently-defined category of protected area designed to promote conservation through local-level participation and development. A review of the Conservation Area Management Regulations of 1996 shows that there are several potential problems inherent in this designation. As written, the regulations move power from the government to organizations under governmental contract. Thus, management authority largely remains top-down from the standpoint of local users. We also question how well the designation will protect some sensitive wildlife species, since organizations do not have law enforcement authority under Nepalese legislation.

Despite these concerns, there have been several successful conservation area programmes in existence in Nepal since the 1980s and most of the issues addressed are surmountable with the current regulations, providing that several criteria are met. We propose that His Majesty's Government and organizations under contract develop more definitive methods of disbursing funds for local-level projects, and institute social impact assessments. In addition, more attention must be paid to wildlife law enforcement; independent assessments of important wild populations and unique habitats are needed. Finally, we discuss some broader issues that should be better addressed in Nepal and elsewhere, including cross-sectoral coordination within the government.

With the closure of many military bases worldwide and a closer scrutiny of practices on remaining bases, the environmental impact of the military is now an important consideration in the operation of bases. Many previously-unknown environmental problems related to chemicals are surfacing. White phosphorus, a chemical commonly used as an obscurant, is a chemical previously thought to be innocuous after use. In 1990, however, it was linked to the deaths of thousands of waterfowl at the Eagle River Flats impact area on Ft Richardson near Anchorage, Alaska, USA, and shortly after, a series of remedial investigations was initiated. This paper describes three of the remedial methods currently under investigation, namely enhanced in-situ remediation, pond draining through ditching or pumping, and dredging. These three approaches are best applied in different environments, but they can be used together or in conjunction with other strategies. Their impacts on the environment will vary as well.

Experience with these remediation strategies has proven very useful in determining the direction that the clean-up effort at Eagle River Flats (ERF) should take. Dredging, an effective means of removing contaminated sediments for off-site remediation, has been shown to be too slow and expensive at the ERF because unexploded ordnance is present. Enhanced natural remediation is effective under favourable climatological conditions in areas that experience intermittent flooding, but desaturation of the sediments is critical to its effectiveness. Pond draining by blasting a ditch effectively removes waterfowl feeding habitat, but attenuation of the contaminant is inhibited because the ditch increases flooding frequency, and the habitat alteration is permanent. Pond pumping, where feasible, has shown great potential for the desaturating of wide areas of ERF, enabling the natural attenuation mechanism to progress. Further investigation will be necessary to confirm these initial conclusions and determine the overall effectiveness of all three methodologies. Methods developed over the course of this work may be applied to other remediation projects where in-situ volatilization can occur and limited disturbance of wetlands is critical.

The Confidential Awards Committee voted Carolyn Crook and Roger Alex Clapp the joint recipients of the Volume 25 ‘Best Paper’ Prize for their paper ‘Is market-oriented forest conservation a contradiction in terms?’ (Crook & Clapp 1998). Their prize was a cheque for SFr 1000, the proceeds being shared between the co-authors.