Clean Technology (process-integrated clean technology), Clean Products (products that during their lifetime and thereafter are relatively environmental friendly) and Cleaning-up technology are useful instruments to achieve - in due time - sustainable development.
It is clear that the quality of all three environmental compartments air-water-soil should be maintained or improved. Within the environment special regard for all the terrestrial and marine organisms in the ecosystems. It is vitally important to take always into account that the environment, including nature has:
1. Carrier Functions, providing space and substrate for all living organisms and other organic as well as inorganic matter, landscape & seascape, energy systems and all man and non-man induced processes.
2. Production Functions, providing materials and energy for production- and consumption processes.
3. Regulation Functions, maintaining essential ecological as well as other systems and processes.
4. Information Functions, providing information in many forms for many different known and unknown purposes.
The diversity of species, their intricate relationships and the range of pressures acting on them in the coastal system make it a very complex system to assess.
On-going monitoring programs producing relevant data are necessary in order to achieve insight how different factors relate to each other and how their combined effects influence the eco-systems under consideration.
AMOEBA (A general Method Of Ecological and Biological Assessment) is one of several interesting tools to meet this need.
The basic idea underlying AMOEBA is that an impression of the relative health of an aquatic or terrestrial environment can be obtained by counting individuals of a selected number of key species and comparing the current figures with corresponding data in the past and future in relation to human activities in that period. Ideally the reference situation needs to be one which guarantees the fundamental values of production and harvest, diversity within the species community and self-regulating ecosystems: in short a sustainable situation.
AMOEBA makes it possible to present the data in a visual form (diagram) revealing almost at a glance the actual state of an aquatic or terrestrial ecosystem and the biological diversity within it.
