Ecological modernisation theory holds that capitalist economic structures can be transformed to avoid long-term environmental damage, through the introduction of modern environmental technologies and reforming modern institutions. Empirical evidence, drawing on ecological modernisation practices in some European and North American contexts, lends support to this view. However, it is not clear yet whether the practices of ecological modernisation can be applied with equal success to agricultural industries, based on farmers as multiple producers. The New Zealand dairy industry faces political and commercial pressure to improve its environmental performance while maintaining commercial competitiveness in a global marketplace. In response to such pressures, the industry"s main umbrella organisation (Fonterra) has taken steps to improve the environmental management practices of the farmers who supply milk. The New Zealand dairy industry offers an example from which to assess the relevance of economical modernisation theory, as it applies to a large, technologically sophisticated, environmentally motivated company, representing the production practices of more than 11,000 dairy milk suppliers.

Protection of New Zealand's native biodiversity and its primary production both depend on biosecurity measures to prevent invasion by alien, or exotic, organisms. At the same time, New Zealand's dependence on trade and travel in an increasingly globalised world places growing strain on the nation's biosecurity systems. Invasion by exotic species has potential for catastrophic impacts on both native biodiversity and human economic and social well-being. New Zealand's biosecurity policies have been gradually evolving from a narrow focus on production pests to a broader awareness of multiple economic, social and ecological objectives. This paper is about the process of reconciling conflicting objectives for biosecurity, with New Zealand as a case study example.

This Viewpoint article reviews the two approaches to climate change, namely mitigation and adaptation, and examines the complex interrelationships between them, and between climate change and sustainable development. Adaptation is about reducing the effects of climate change on both human and natural systems; and mitigation is about reducing the causes of climate change by decreasing the anthropogenic impact on the climate system. The implications of an apparently warming world clearly mean that there is need for mitigation; but how effective will mitigation be, and how far are we prepared to go, to reconcile conflicting interests and tensions? Despite relatively slow progress, some forms of sustainable development have appeared, and these offer the best hope we have of mitigating human contribution to climate change, and adapting to its consequences. However, it is also necessary to view the issue of climate change as holistically as possible, whereby socio-economic objectives, needs and desires are reconciled with environmental limits, because science and technology are limited in their capacity to solve problems on a planetary scale.

There is growing interest in the use of images in GIs applications. This paper examines the role of root-mean-square error in assessing the accuracy of digitisation and image-to-world transformation. The study employed Arc/Info software, using an aerial photograph of a small coastal settlement as the base image. The transformed image was overlayed onto a calibrated digital cadastre of the town to evaluate (visually) the geometric integrity of the image rectificalion. While not dismissing the relevance of rms error in the statistical appraisal of data quality in GIs, the study failed to confirm a workable association between rms error and the quality of image transformation. No apparent improvement in the quality of image transformation was achieved as a result of reducing rms error directly, by eliminating the control points with high residual error.

The development of temporal GIS systems capable of dealing with the evolution of geographical objects is still a challenging task. Although many successful GIS systems have been implemented, comparatively little has been done on how to determine and analyze the patterns of continuous changes of geographical objects. The aim of this paper is to construct a GIS system using an object-oriented model, which is able to track the evolution of geographical objects over time continuously. In addition, the system can allow the events and processes related to each object to be determined and analyzed