ABSTRACT
The systems approach to studying environmental and economic issues has grown significantly over recent years. Whereas between 1980 and 1990 only four articles in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) contained reference to environment, ecological and system in their topic, during 2000–2009 the comparable figure had increased over a thousand fold to 1345 articles. 1 This rate of growth is much faster than the overall rate of growth of scholarly articles included in the SCI and SSCI and thus reflects the growing importance of the whole systems or earth systems approach within science and social science research. This chapter looks at the characteristics of this ‘earth systems’ or ‘whole systems’ approach to ecological economics.
