Journal of forecasting special issue forecasting environmental change

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1988
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 59 KB
• Volume: 7
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0277-6693
• DOI: 10.1002/for.3980070208

✦ Synopsis

There are many environmental problems worthy of forecasting. For example, one might wish to determine the changes that would occur in a lake ecological system as a result of a ban on the discharge of a polluting substance, or assess the reversibility of the effects of acid rain, speculate about future trends of carbon dioxide levels in the upper atmosphere, or attempt to simulate the consequences of another Chernobyl event. Various types of models might be used for such purposes, including time-series models, sets of ordinary-and partial-differential equations, and linguistic models, to name just three broad categories. All such models have their advocates-much to the benefit of lively debate-yet all are likely to be confounded by the age-old problem of being required to forecast the future under conditions substantially different from those of the past. A river system will almost certainly exhibit different behaviour patterns before and after major civil engineering works, such as the construction of a dam. Can we really presume to answer such questions of prediction, what is the philosophical basis for so doing, and if we cannot so presume, what else should we do?

The Journal is to publish a special issue on Forecasting Environmental Change, and accordingly invites papers to be submitted from authors who believe they have answers to the foregoing questions (or, better still, better questions to be asked). Contributions should concentrate on one or all of the following points:

(i) forecasting behaviour in the longer-term;

(ii) attempting to forecast substantially different futures;

(iii) generating temporal trajectories of variables;

(iv) assessing the role of uncertainties associated with the forecast.