Various chapters enlist different scales of analysis to explore the manifestation and causes of global environmental risks in all the diversity of their regional expression. Throughout, the editors and contributors accord prominence to the vulnerability of people and places to environmental degradation. Understanding vulnerability is a neglected key to assessing the nature of the risks and determining strategies for altering trajectories of threat. Global risk futures, the editors argue, are not intractable, and are still amenable to a risk-analysis enterprise that is democratic in principle, humanistic in concept, and geared to the realities that pertain to the particular societies, locales, and regions that will ultimately bear the risk.
Jeanne X. Kasperson, research Associate Professor and Research Librarian at the George Perkin's Marsh Institute, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, is a visiting scholar at the Stockholm Environment Institute.
Roger E. Kasperson, after more than 30 years at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, where he was University Professor (Government and Geography) and Director of the George Perkins Institute, has joined the Stockholm Environment Institute as its Executive Director.