ABSTRACT
Right from their invention in the late 1970s Biosphere Reserves (BRs) were ahead of their time. Designed to be ‘super nature reserves’ conserving pristine examples of the biosphere’s great ecosystems, they rapidly metamorphosed into ‘living laboratories for sustainable development’ before the term ‘sustainable development’. They went beyond the idea of a nature reserve as an island of biodiversity separated from human life, to that of a natural system where people and nature lived in mutually supportive balance. The UNESCO Man and the Biosphere (MAB) programme that originated the concept also had a project on Urban Systems and in the early 1990s workers began to seriously consider if these two strands could be linked and the Biosphere Reserve concept applied to urban areas.
