Natural Change in the Environment: A Challenge to the Pressure-State-Response Concept

The pressure-state-response framework is a powerful approach to environmental assessment. In many of its current expressions, however, it ignores the background natural processes that play a major role in determining environmental and ecosystem health. Clearly, policies must be focused on human actions that scar the landscape and harm the environment, but coping with environmental change also requires an assessment of the natural processes that take place whether or not human influences are at work. A newly-developed class of environmental indicators (geoindicators), presented here in brief, may be helpful in understanding the interaction of human and natural processes and impacts. Explicit recognition of the need to include natural conditions in the indicator system is essential in the transition from environmental reporting to sustainability reporting.