Global Environmental Change Understanding the Human Dimensions (1992) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 1-16
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From page 1... ...
To understand global environmental change, it is necessary to focus on the interactions of environmental systems, including the atmosphere, the biosphere, the geosphere, and the hydrosphere, and human systems, including economic, political, cultural, and sociotechnical systems. Human systems and environmental systems meet in two places: where human actions proximately cause environmental change, that is, where they directly alter aspects of the environment, and where environmental changes directly affect what humans value.
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· Economic Growth For the first time in human history, economic activity is so extensive that it produces environmental change at the global level; the prospect of further economic growth arouses concern about the quality of the global environment. Economic growth necessarily stresses the environment, but the amount of stress from a given amount of economic growth depends, among other things, on the pattern of goods and services produced, the population and resource base for agricultural development, forms of national political organization, and development policies.
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From page 3... ...
For example, various combinations of social conditions may lead to a single outcome, such as deforestation. Single-factor explanations of the anthropogenic sources of giobal environmental change are apt to be misleading, because the driving forces of global change generally act in combination with each other and the interactions are contingent on place, time, and level of analysis.
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But long-term forecasting is stall a very inexact practice. The near-term research agenda should emphasize processes of human response to the stresses that global environmental change might present.
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· International cooperation is necessary to address some largescale environmental changes such as ozone depletion and global warming. The formation of international institutions for response to global change is widely considered to be the key to solving
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Studies of the human dimensions of global change require analysis at spatial and temporal expanses much greater than most social scientific theory encompasses. Social science will need to develop new theoretical tools for analyzing such issues as major national and international changes in political-economic structure, the sources of variation and change in slowly changing aspects of human systems, the long-term impacts of short-term social changes, relationships between global social changes and the global environment, and links between human-environment relationships at different levels of spatial aggregation.
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Post hoc evaluations are an important part of the process of analyzing policy alternatives for response to global change, and resources should be provided for them. In particular, federal agencies with programs or policies anticipated to affect processes of global environmental change should routinely budget funds for evaluation studies of the intended and unintended consequences of these activities.
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The federal government should support an effort to validate the most promising remotely sensed indicators of social phenomena and include them in the information network. The committee recommends that social scientists, representing a variety of disciplines, be involved at every stage of the design and implementation of national data and information systems relevant to the human dimensions of global change, including representation on the Earth Observing System Science Advisory Panel, to ensure that data are collected and archived in a form that facilitates analyzing human interactions.
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Individuals who commit time to such programs often do so to the detriment of their own careers Therefore, in addition to shortterm research support, programs of research on the human dimensions of global change need to develop long-term institutional identities. The committee recommends that sponsors of research on the human dimensions of global change address some of their support to building institutional entities that control their own faculty appointments and other key resources that will enable them to attract the interest and resources of individuals who are already present but not yet committed to global change as a research agenda.
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The Committee on Earth and Environmental Sciences might, as appropriate, assign important areas of human interactions research to the National Science Foundation, to particular mission agencies with the requirement that they take on new staff or make use of outside expertise to handle the assignment, or, if no existing agency is appropriate, to a new organizational entity, staffed with social and natural scientists. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR A NATIONAL RESEARCH PROGRAM The social and behavioral sciences have a vital contribution to make to enhancing understanding of global environmental change.
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b. Studies of tbe antbropogenic souIces of globa1 cbange sbould receive pIiority to tbe extent tbat they empbasize interactious among socia1 driving forces.
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Recommendation 2 The National Science Foundation, other appropriate federal agencies, and private funding sources should establish programs of targeted or focused research on the human dimensions of global change. There is a national need to establish an ongoing program of targeted or focused research-that is, a program that will concentrate resources to advance understanding of topics selected by the funding sources for their obvious significance for global environmental change.
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What institutional arrangements could ensure the effective use of the most promising of these approaches2 · TechnoJogy-Environment Relationship What determines whether the technologies developed and adopted in major economic sectors mitigate or exacerbate global environmental change? What are the roles of factor prices, regulatory practices, legal and institutional arrangements, standards of performance or practice, and other characteristics of the decision environment in determining which technological options are pursued and adopted?
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· International Environmental Cooperation What can we learn from the recent experience with ozone depletion that is relevant to international efforts to deal with climate change or the Toss of biodiversity: When do governments resort to international cooperation in dealing with environmental changes, and when are the resultant regimes likely to prove effective? Recommendation 3 The federal government should establish an ongoing program to ensure that appropriate data sets for research on the human dimensions of global change are routinely acquired, properly prepared for use, and made available to researchers on simple and affordable terms.
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We believe that investigator-initiated research on human interactions, currently funded at a level of $3.6 million per year through the National Science Foundation, can and should be tripled to a level of about $11 million. Targeted or focused research on the human dimensions of global change should be funded at a comparable level with investigator-initiated re
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From page 16... ...
In light of the National Research Council's conclusion that the human interactions science priority is "the most critically underfunded in the FY 1991 budget for the USGCRP" {National Research Council, 1990b:95l, an increase of this magnitude over a short time period seems fully justified. Support for appropriate parts of the research program outlined here could come from an emerging Mitigation and Adaptation Research Strategies program as well as from the Global Change Research Program.
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