Managing military training-related environmental disturbance.

Military Training Areas (MTAs) cover at least 2 percent of the Earth's terrestrial surface and occur in all major biomes. These areas are potentially important for biodiversity conservation. The greatest challenge in managing MTAs is balancing the disturbance associated with military training and environmental values.

Integrating resilience thinking and optimisation for conservation.

Conservation strategies need to be both effective and efficient to be successful. To this end, two bodies of research should be integrated, namely 'resilience thinking' and 'optimisation for conservation,' both of which are highly policy relevant but to date have evolved largely separately. Resilience thinking provides an integrated perspective for analysis, emphasising the potential of nonlinear changes and the interdependency of social and ecological systems.

Precaution, prediction, proof, and policy assessment.

The challenge of sustainable development--the ultimate goal of precaution-- demands that we shift our focus away from individual environmental problems and toward long-term integration of environmental, social, and economic policy. It also elevates protection of ecosystem processes and biodiversity to the status of significant policy goals. In this article, the author argues for a new use of the precautionary principle, as a means to assess broad policy decisions to target indirect or systemic rather than direct threats to sustainability.