







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 5 (1): 239-243 January 2022 

BOOK REVIEW 

Role and Scope of Environmental Models 

Purnamita Dasgupta* 

KN Ninan (Ed.). 2020. Environmental Assessments Scenarios, Modelling and 
Policy. UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN: 978 1 78897 686 2, 288 pp. 

The book Environmental 
Assessments: Scenarios, 
Modelling and Policy presents 
various perspectives on the 
role and contribution of 
environmental models in 
safeguarding nature and 
natural wealth. As its editor 
KN Ninan wrote in a recent 
article, nature is the key to 
human well-being and 
prosperity. Ninan is 
Chairperson of the Centre 
for Economics, 
Environment, and Society at 
Bangalore, India. He applies 
his rich experience in 
working with natural 
resources to bring together a 
volume of contributions by 
eminent scholars in the field 
of environmental modelling 
and scenario building with 
links to policy relevance. As 
Anne Larigauderie, 

 
* Chair Professor, Environmental & Resource Economics Unit, Institute of Economic 

Growth, Delhi; purnamita.dasgupta@gmail.com  

Copyright © Dasgupta 2022. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © 

NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 

Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v5i1.617  

 

mailto:purnamita.dasgupta@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v5i1.617


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [240]   

 
 
Executive Secretary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on 
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), notes in her foreword to the 
book: 

Scenarios and models have been a key component of most global, regional and 
national environmental assessments carried out over the last decade, including 
those of IPBES. Scenarios and models in assessments of biodiversity and 
ecosystem services have helped in alerting the scientific community and policy-
makers to the possible future risks for nature, nature’s contribution to people and 
the quality of their lives, and sustainable development. 

An elaboration on the context within which this book review was written 
may be in order. The ongoing pandemic has brought home the ground 
reality of the need to restore and maintain a human–nature balance—as 
much to the uninitiated as to the converted. This year, publications from 
three important financial institutions—The UK Treasury (the Dasgupta 
Review), OECD (2021), and World Bank (Johnson et al. 2021) have 
highlighted the criticality of biodiversity and nature for human well-being, 
and the interlinkages between the economy and nature. An initial simulation 
estimate (Dobson et al. 2020) suggests that the present value of prevention 
costs of the pandemic for 10 years, through interventions such as 
combatting deforestation and limiting wildlife trade, could be just 2% of the 
total cost attributed to the pandemic. That the degradation of ecosystems 
and biodiversity losses can lead to societal welfare losses running into 
billions of dollars is being increasingly recognised, as is the consequent 
worry about how best to reduce risks to ecosystems. It is here that well-
designed models and scenario analyses can contribute towards assessing 
risks and formulating steps to prevent or reduce these environmental 
consequences (and future losses). The imperatives imposed by a changing 
climate that adversely impacts nature’s contribution to people and 
exacerbates biodiversity losses are, for instance, an area that calls for urgent 
action to achieve food security, planetary health, and protect biodiversity 
(FAO 2021; IPBES 2019).  

The potential for models to contribute towards alerting stakeholders about 
threats and risks to the environment has been well recognized in the 
scientific literature. As noted in the preface, the importance of 
mainstreaming such knowledge within environmental decision-making by 
policymakers gained traction with the IPBES, which took this up in its 
Methodological Assessment Report on Scenarios and Models of Biodiversity and 
Ecosystem Services, specifically in the context of global warming and 
biodiversity loss. As several scholars have noted, biodiversity loss and 
climate change are interlinked concerns that can be addressed 



[241] Purnamita Dasgupta 

 

simultaneously through interventions for ecosystem restoration (for 
instance, see Strassburg et al. 2020). As the Dasgupta Review (2021) notes, 
restoration is costlier than conservation for ecosystems.  The most recent 
Insights publication, Martin et al. (2021) states that: “Due to climate change, 
ecosystems and people are confronted with unprecedented, often locally 
new, climate-forced impacts, with humanitarian crises looming as a result of 
degrading living conditions and the potential for cascading risks across 
various scales.” 

It is in this context that Environmental Assessments is a timely and value-added 
contribution to the existing literature on ways to enhance informed 
decision-making to avoid upsetting nature–people relationships and 
ensuring that environmental risks are minimised to the maximum extent 
possible.  

Over 13 chapters, the book examines various theoretical framings as well as 
empirical applications of environmental models and scenario-building 
exercises, with a focus on understanding the drivers of environmental 
change as well as the implications for human society. The first three 
chapters (Part I) examine theoretical and conceptual issues in specific 
contexts, including the paper by Teh et al. (2016) in Regional Environmental 
Change (re-published here) on developing national-scale integrated socio-
ecological scenarios for Canada’s oceans and marine fisheries. Two 
subsequent chapters bring forth the complexities in estimating the 
economic effects of climate change in the context of Integrated Assessment 
models (Prieg and Yumashev) and monitoring land-use and land-cover 
changes at multiple spatial scales (Rosa). Both these chapters deal with two 
very important current topics, namely, the use of spatial data and Integrated 
Assessment models in the context of the environment. 

In Part II, a mix of applications and case studies are presented at various 
scales—global, regional, and national—with illustrations and cases from a 
range of sectors including forestry, wetlands and oceans, agriculture and 
livestock, fisheries, invasive species, and urban ecosystems. The global 
appeal of the book is in the geographies that it covers, including ocean and 
marine fisheries in Canada, livestock and deforestation in Brazil, forests in 
Cambodia, seafood supplies in British Columbia, drivers of environmental 
change in Latin America and the Caribbean, wetland management in 
Kerala, India, municipal planning and adaptive management in Nicaragua. 
The tone for the section is set by two key chapters, the first of which is a 
re-publication of the paper by Kubiszewski et al. (2017) in Ecosystem Services, 
which discusses the future value of ecosystem services in the context of 
global scenarios. This is followed by an excellent exposition on the 
challenges of modelling, in the context of controlling invasive exotic weeds 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [242]   

 
 
in protected areas. Illustrations, data, and substantive evidence are crucial 
for building confidence in the application of environmental studies in any 
form or shape. This section does an excellent job of presenting myriad ways 
of working with environmental models and scenarios to target the policy 
relevance of modelling-based research studies. 

An interested reader may want to begin with the introduction, which is 
exceptionally comprehensive and well-written. It puts together substantial 
information not only regarding the contents of the book but also on several 
basic concepts such as descriptions of various tools and frameworks and 
types of scenarios and models and the purposes they serve. It provides 
valuable direction to the reader on the heady mix of technical diversity 
incorporated within the subsequent chapters. 

This book is an important contribution to research on environmental 
models, providing a comprehensive overview of the literature on building 
scenarios and how these can contribute in decision-making to reduce risks 
to planetary health and human well-being. 

 

REFERENCES 

Dasgupta, Partha. 2021. “The Economics of Biodiversity.” The Dasgupta Review. 
London, UK: HM Treasury. www.gov.uk/official-documents.  

Díaz, Sandra, Josef Settele, Eduardo Brondízio, Hien T Ngo, Maximilien Guèze, 
John Agard, Almul Arneth, et al. 2019. “Summary for Policymakers of the Global 
Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the 
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem 
Services.” Bonn, Germany: IPBES Secretariat. 

Dobson, Andrew P, Stuart L Pimm, Lee Hannah, Les Kaufman, Jorge A Ahumada, 
Amy W Ando, Aaron Bernstein, et al. 2020. “Ecology and Economics for 
Pandemic Prevention.” Science 369 (6502): 379–381. 
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abc3189.  

FAO. 2021. “Scientific Review of the Impact of Climate Change on Plant Pests – A 
Global Challenge to Prevent and Mitigate Plant Pest Risks in Agriculture, Forestry 
and Ecosystems.” Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization on behalf of the 
IPPC Secretariat. https://doi.org/10.4060/cb4769en.   

Johnson, Justin Andrew, Giovanni Ruta, Uris Baldos, Raffaello Cervigni, Shun 
Chonabayashi, Erwin Corong, Olga Gavryliuk, James Gerber, Thomas Hertel, 
Christopher Nootenboom, et al. 2021. The Economic Case for Nature: A Global 
Earth-Economy Model to Assess Development Policy Pathways. Washington, 
D.C.: World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/35882 
License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.   

http://www.gov.uk/official-documents
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abc3189
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[243] Purnamita Dasgupta 

 

Kubiszewski, Ida, Robert Costanza, Sharolyn Anderson and Paul C Sutton. 2017. 
“The Future Value of Ecosystem Services: Global Scenarios and National 
Implications.” Ecosystem Services 26: 289–301. 
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2017.05.004.  

Martin, Maria A, Olga Alcarez Sendra, Ana Bastos, Nico Bauer, Christoph Bertram, 
Thorsten Blenckner, Kathryn Bowen, et al. 2021. “Ten New Insights in Climate 
Science 2021: A Horizon Scan.” Global Sustainability 4 (25). 
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2021.25.  

OECD. 2021. “Biodiversity, Natural Capital and the Economy: A Policy Guide for 
Finance, Economic and Environment Ministers,” OECD Environment Policy 
Papers 26. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/1a1ae114-en.  

Strassburg, Bernardo BN, Alvaro Iribarrem, Hawthorne L Beyer, Carlos Leandro 
Cordeiro, Renato Crouzeilles, Catarina C Jakovac, André Braga Junqueira, et al. 
2020. “Global Priority Areas for Ecosystem Restoration.” Nature 586 (7831): 724–
729. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2784-9.  

Teh, Louise, William Cheung, and Rashid U Sumaila. 2016. “Scenarios for 
Investigating the Future of Canada's Oceans and Marine Fisheries Under 
Environmental and Socioeconomic Change.” Regional Environmental Change 17(3): 
619–633.  https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788976879.00012  

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2017.05.004
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2021.25
https://doi.org/10.1787/1a1ae114-en
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2784-9
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788976879.00012

