Ten years on from the landmark environmental education conference at Tbilisi, it is salutary to reflect on the extent to which some of the distinguishing characteristics espoused in the nineteen-seventies are manifest in environmental education of the 'eighties. The critical problem-solving interest of environmental education recommended in the literature of the 'seventies was consistent with the social/political concerns of the world community at the time—concerns to which the UNESCO environmental education programme was a response. However, this critical problem-solving interest is not commonplace in schools, and still represents a serious challenge to the existing patterns of schooling. Consequently the position that environmental education should entail widespread educational reform is nowadays becoming stronger and more evident.

Evaluation of the conservation education programme at Kinabalu Park in Malaysia demonstrated the importance of such evaluation in determining a programme's worth and providing due observation of feedback and opportunity for improvement. The goal of the programme was to foster more favourable attitudes towards the park system and the conservation of natural resources than formerly prevailed among local villagers. The programme was formally evaluated by using a survey instrument in the form of a mobile unit's questionnaire that had been designed to obtain information about shifts in villagers' attitudes towards the Park before and after exposure to the conservation programme.

A method is described of matching environmentally significant areas (ESAs) with the most appropriate form of management for each, selected from all the available forms. This involves comparing the purpose, reasons for significance, existing uses, and tenure, of each ESA, with the characteristics of agencies, protected area categories, legislation, and non-statutory arrangements for management, as well as examining agency coordination mechanisms or other means of implementation. The method was formulated for ESAs in the Northwest Territories (NWT) of Canada, but is considered to have wide applicability. It is illustrated with a test application to seven proposed ESAs in what is termed the eastern Beaufort Sea region.

The interest in the wetlands ecosystems on Calcutta's periphery should be understood in the context of the search for development alternatives—for locally-adapted, appropriate modes of development rather than transplantation of alien models. Too often, planners look abroad for ideas without realizing that appropriate principles and practices are present in their own backyards. We are now coming to understand that ecodevelopment entails bringing together creative techniques with the ways in which people perceive and approach the issues of quality of life through environmental changes that are in the forefront of planning debates. Human and ecologically-sound planning requires an integration of such understanding with suitable techniques and procedures.

Sudan is one of the African countries that are most seriously stricken by drought, desertification, and famine. Although accurate assessment of the disaster is yet to be documented, published data indicate that some 40% of the human population have been affected. In the Kordofan region alone, some 2.8 million people were subjected to the famine and half-a-million died. The drought's incidence and effects in western Sudan decreased from the Desert zone southwards across the Sahelian zone to the Sudanian zone.

The forest canopy, biomass, and basal tree-trunk cover, of an area of about 200,000 ha, comprising 10 subcatchments in the Indian Central Himalaya, were mapped by employing aerial photographs and non-destructive field sampling. This method provides basic information on the current forest land-use and biomass for enlightened environmental planning and conservation. Regression equations developed to describe predictive relationships between crown-cover and basal tree-trunk cover; biomass and crown-cover; basal tree-trunk cover and bole biomass; and basal tree-trunk cover and total above-ground biomass, for different forests occurring in the area, should prove of value for future ecological studies in the Central Himalaya.

The endemic Hawaiian biota, having evolved in nearly complete isolation from continental organisms, and lacking as it does many major continental groups, is highly vulnerable to introduced ungulate herbivores, vertebrate predators, predacious and parasitoid insects, predacious snails, and yet other animal and plant groups. Although most of the Hawaiian lowland biota has been obliterated by Man and his introductions, relatively intact ecosystems survive at higher elevations in Hawaii's national parks and elsewhere. Long-term survival of these native ecosystems will depend largely upon the quality, intensity, and endurance, of continuing active management.