Integrated environmental models: a survey

Abstract

The main aim of treating these models here is to indicate the wide range of situations in which integrated environmental models (abbreviated as IEMs) have been applied in the past ten years (e.g., in water resource management models, land use planning models, agricultural, regional and urban planning, as well as ecosystem management planning models). Fourteen integrated environmental models will be discussed. This is a small but fairly representative sample of models which have actually been operationalized. The next chapter evaluates the strong and weak points of each of these models. The models originate from various countries with different fields of application, and use various mathematical tools for integrating the successive modules. Examples of such mathematical tools are, among others, optimization, simulation and evaluation techniques. An exhaustive survey of IEMs is given by Braat and van Lierop (1984). Such models are characterized by a multidisciplinary approach to environmentally relevant phenomena originating from different disciplines. There are links - either direct and/or indirect - between various constituent modules which have their background in different disciplines such as (regional) economics, ecology, demography, recreation, geography etc. In the sequel of this chapter, a module will be interpreted as a set of interrelated - often monodisciplinary oriented - variables which have their background in a specific, identifiable part of a compound environmental phenomenon