Integrated assessment and modelling: an essential way of doing science1

In an era of great global change and major natural resource management problems, the nature of scientific research is changing to a situation of greater involvement with society. Integrated Assessment implies that the science is exemplary and that it is being done in the context of social and economic forces at work in society. Science is being used to generate both explanations and policy options. The scale and scope of both the problems we study and the science we employ is changing to encompass larger, more complex regional and continental — even global — scale problems. This is a new kind of science coupled to new economics, new sociology and new management policies. Synthesis and integration is a challenge to both modelling and communicaiton. New kinds of models using new combinations of often disparate data are being employed.