Agent Based Modeling Workshop - April 17th-18th
The Institute for Society, Landscape and Ecosystem Change is hosting a workshop on agent-based modeling, bringing scientists together to discuss its value for solving complex problems. Deb Winslow, program officer from the National Science Foundation and an advocate of agency-based modeling, will be attending the discussion. Stay tuned for more details
Fikret Berkes coming to CSU on April 28th
Please mark your calenders - ISLEC is hosting a visit by Fikret Berkes, a researcher specializing in the fields of resilience and sustainability science. The public seminar will be held on April 28th
Adding the Human Component in Global Environmental Change Research
Adding the Human Component in Global Environmental Change Research
Kathleen A. Galvin
When I saw the black box on the famous Bretherton diagram at an Aspen Global Change Institute symposium on Global Environmental Change in 1992, I knew that social science—and anthropology in particular—had a way to go to make any kind of contribution to global change research. Named after the influential Earth System scientist, Francis P Bretherton, the diagram breaks the Earth System down into its major parts .
The Earth System, Francis P Bretherton.
The subcomponents representing systems such as the physical climate system, biogeochemical cycles and biological systems were represented with some detail. The human component, by contrast, was a box with faces of people! To be fair, global change research in the natural sciences was begun much earlier than any social science research on the human dimensions of global environmental change, but a single box?
The Global Environmental Change symposium was dominated by climate scientists. A few ecologists attended as well. A few geographers and I were the only social scientists present. The first and perhaps largest representation of social scientists in global environmental change research has come from geography because Earth System science is inherently spatial and focuses on many spatial and temporal scales; geographers often work at the regional scale and have expertise in geographic information system (GIS) technology.
The symposium forced me to ask myself: what did I, as an anthropologist, have to offer? I have to admit I was a bit overwhelmed, and I did not make a major contribution to that meeting. But it made me think. The Bretherton diagram is about the entire Earth after all! How could anthropology contribute to it?
Human-Environment Research
That same year, the National Research Council book came out, Global Environmental Change: Understanding the Human Dimensions. It marked the beginning of efforts on the part of anthropology, political science and economics, among other disciplines, to work with natural scientists to address human–environmental questions. Research topics included land use and land cover change, regional climate change, vulnerability, adaptation, sustainability and decision making, much of which anthropologists explore anyway. I joined in.
Since I had already been working with issues of climate variability and had experience in cross-disciplinary collaboration, I was used to thinking about interdisciplinary human-environment research questions. My research has focused, in part, on how people who live in arid and semi-arid lands cope with climate variability, including the interactions between climate and human behavior and biology, culture and ecology of pastoral nomads.
Keeping track of time spent in specific activities and diet-intake methods from biological anthropology, I found that caloric intake of pastoralists in northern Kenya was low throughout the year but similar from one season to the next. These remarkable people were able, through management of multiple species of livestock, to maintain a flow of food into the household despite severe climatic restraints on livestock production.
My graduate training included working with ecologists, simulation modelers, remote sensing and GIS on a large interdisciplinary project and my research continues in this vein today. My research and that of my students and colleagues suggest that increasing fragmentation of rangelands through land tenure changes, including converting open communal rangeland to private parcels, is constraining pastoralists to cope with increasing climate variability. We learn through classic anthropological methods: household surveys, focus group interviews and archival work.
Understanding Local Processes
Study of the human dimensions of global environmental change has come a long way since that meeting in 1992 but it still has a substantial way to go. In 1997 while at the Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Change conference in Laxenburg, Austria there were many papers on the correlation between land cover change as shown from satellite data and GIS models. What was missing was an understanding of the processes to explain what was occurring on the ground—an understanding of what people are doing in their communities; what decisions they are making, as well as changes in land use and their perceptions of the causes and consequences of these changes. This is where anthropology can make an enormous contribution.
Since anthropologists tend to work at the local level, their efforts to connect with global environmental change research does involve constant tension of how to scale it up. The problem can be addressed, in part, through modeling and GIS. But it is also important to recognize the inherent value of understanding the processes at the local level, regardless of whether they can be scaled up. Indeed, anthropologists often explore the effects of local to global institutions of power and influence in various contexts and scales.
Interdisciplinary Issues and Opportunities
Often anthropologists are not trained to work with people in other disciplines or the tools they use. Even if anthropologists would like to collaborate with other scholars, it is often difficult for them to know what these other disciplines can offer by way of expertise. For example, if one does not know the value of computer modeling (and its limits), it is hard to include it in an anthropology research project. This is a matter of training. If anthropologists are interested in global environmental change then they need to have opportunities and resources to learn the tools that can help them address current research questions, such as agent-based modeling for understanding land use changes.
Anthropologists need to step up and explain why what they do is important and why it is important to understand what is occurring at the local level. There are ample venues and opportunities to do so. The International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) of Global Environmental Change is the flagship organization taking a lead on research on the human dimensions of environmental change. IHDP sponsors the Open Meeting of the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change every two years, a venue for social scientists to come together (http;//sedac.ciesin.org/openmeetings/. IHDP has seven core science projects, several of which might be of interest to anthropologists, such as the Global Land Project and the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change. One of the goals of each of these projects is to communicate scientific knowledge to policymakers and to the broader society.
Increasingly, there is a need to translate knowledge into practice—to get anthropological knowledge out into public and policy arenas. There are numerous ways to do that: testifying to Congress, writing op-ed columns in newspapers, giving interviews to TV and radio programs, giving public lectures in local museums, schools, clubs and organizations, developing publicly accessible, user-friendly websites and developing documentaries of research for the public. Academicians are often not trained to do any of this but there are training opportunities out there such as the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program.
No one discipline has the answers to the complex global change problems but anthropology should be one of those contributing.
Kathleen A Galvin is professor and chair of the department of anthropology and senior research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.
Reprinted from the American Anthropological Association Newsletter.