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Each volume in this series offers an overview of a career category followed by a selection of jobs, profiled in detail. Each profile discusses the nature of the job, earnings, prospects for employment what kind of training and skills it requires and sources for further information.

Asia faces growing vulnerability to natural disasters, flooding, drought and other transboundary environmental problems, with severe consequences for rural and urban communities, food security, economic growth, and political stability. Environmental problems, by their very nature, are as complex as they are inevitable. They are the unintended by-products of the very development activities nations pursue to grow their economies. Addressing environmental issues requires strong governance structures to facilitate multi-sectoral and multilevel dialogue among government agencies, private sector, civil society, research institutions, and other stakeholders. Ultimately, solutions require collective political will: stakeholders from across sectors working toward a shared vision for socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable development. The Asia Foundation, drawing upon 60 years of governance experience, plays an essential role in helping Asian countries address critical national and regional environmental challenges.

Cover -- Series -- Title -- Contents -- Preface -- 1 Environmental Beginnings -- 2 The Stuff We Are Made of -- 3 Life in a Bubble -- 4 Turning Petroleum into People -- 5 Running Out of Ink for Human Blueprints -- 6 Tracing Rachel Carson's Path -- 7 Regrettable Substitutions -- 8 From Tobacco to Teflon Babies -- 9 Yesterday's Fuel Becomes Today's Forgetfulness -- 10 The High Price of Meat -- 11 Plastic Hangover -- 12 Shrapnel in Human Eyes and Bodies -- 13 Diagnosing Humanity -- 14 One with the Environment -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- Copyright.

Many environmental problems are large scale in terms of geographical units and long-term with regard to time. We therefore find a coincidence of different causes and impacts that qualify the interplay between humans and nature as highly uncertain ("transparency challenge"). In consequence we see a need for innovative analytical methods and modelling approaches to supplement the traditional monitoring-based approach in environmental policy. This should allow capturing different degrees of uncertainty which in general is out of power of any monitoring activity. Moreover, with regard to the design of monitoring approaches it requires collecting and connecting data from different fields of social activities in regard of a divergence of natural and social systems' boundaries. This requires the provision of sufficient, frequently huge data sets ("availability challenge") that need to fit with each other ("compatibility challenge"). Even if these challenges are met data processing remains a very complex and time-consuming task which should be supported by a user-friendly infrastructure. We here see a comparative advantage in using the GIS technology and a nested structure for data provision supporting the up and down scaling of information and the access of data from different perspectives ("connectivity challenge") - a polluters, a victims and a regulators point of view.

Building on interdisciplinary work by critical and feminist scholars in geography, architecture and urban planning, and history, this article proposes a reworking of social work's person-environment formulation to incorporate gender and its implications more fully. Three interlocking domains are addressed: (a) women's subjective experiences of their everyday environments; (b) the connections among these environmental experiences, the geography of women's lives, and larger social categories such as race/ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation; and (c) women's environmental strengths, resources, and agency.