Developing a Concept of Adaptive Community Learning: Case Study of a Rapidly Urbanizing Watershed

Abstract

An iterative approach to working with a community's environmental concerns, at the interface between science and society, is presented. We call this adaptive community learning, within which the principles of adaptive environmental assessment and management are embedded. Handling uncertainty - indeed, gross uncertainty - is integral to our approach. We place our discussion in the context of the evolving foundations of the kind of science needed to address contemporary issues of the environment and sustainability. We then illustrate development and application of our approach in a prototypical case study of managing the quality of Lake Lanier, Georgia (USA), in the face of potentially significant suburbanisation of its watershed. Our primary purpose is to communicate the entirety of the approach as succinctly as possible, without the clutter of the specific results emerging in the several disciplines keyed into the project as a whole.