Scaling environmental issues: problems and paradoxes

This paper introduces the theme of this special issue, “scaling and environmental understanding”. Environmental problems are scale-specific. Consequently, environmental policy should be scale-specific, too. The scaling of environmental problems and policies is difficult because the processes creating environmental problems are non-linear. Therefore, scaling is not similar to merely choosing an appropriate magnification, as it were. Scaling requires understanding of the dynamics of the processes. I discuss two heuristic perspectives toward scaling, hierarchy and self-similarity, and suggest the use of analog models as a methodological perspective to identify fruitful similarities between physical and socio-cultural processes. A common denominator among many of the papers included in this issue is to construct analog models for particular dynamic features of environmental issues.