Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Pathways for the Next Decade (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 10-40
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losses included $2 billion to $5 billion by international airline and hotel chains from lost tourism. Extreme weather events compounding local vulnerabilities (multiple stresses)
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are they and at what cost? How do we value and decide among the range of options?
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energy use. But there is also a growing body of work on the fundamental social processes that drive human use of the environment.
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global environment mainly occurred in recent decades. However, research has shown that many forests were cleared in the distant past or have been managed for centuries and that their current rich biodiversity may be a product of past human manipulation, resulting in higher frequencies of species with economic, medicinal, and other human uses than might be expected to result from natural processes of secondary succession.27 Although human population growth is commonly seen as the major cause of land cover change and destruction of habitats for biota, particularly because of land clearing to grow food, the role of population is in fact far more complex.
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Field studies of land use have provided information of great relevance to global and regional atmosphere-biosphere modeling. For example, coarseresolution satellite data tend to represent the predominant soil type or vegetation in each grid cell, even if a minor soil or vegetation type is of major economic or ecological significance.
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• Road construction in forests leads to increased deforestation not only by farmers claiming land but also by logging companies. However, there is still inadequate knowledge on such key issues as these: • How to develop land management institutions that both respond to local needs and mitigate global environmental change.
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spatial) in resource management.43 Research on common property management, discussed in a later section of this chapter, has drawn many important examples from marine ecosystem use.44 Some important insights of this research include the following: • People have responded to problems in coastal marine systems primarily by intensifying, diversifying, and expanding the areal extent of their uses of those systems, tending to extend such problems to the global level.
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nitrogen cycle and to human consumption of other environmentally significant materials. The results are useful as inputs to climate models, for anticipating future rates of environmental change, and for identifying effective ways to mobilize social and economic forces to alter trajectories of environmental change.
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Research has focused on identifying how the energy consumption patterns of firms and individuals change as a function of changes in information, incentives, technology, and social organization, thus illuminating the potential for reducing society's reliance on fossil fuels by promoting the adoption of new technologies or changing behaviors and preferences. Specific areas of extensive research include technology-focused research on energy consumption, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and nuclear power; research on price elasticities and response to incentives; and research on behavioral and informational factors affecting change in consumer choice.53 Consumer energy choices are also shaped by political and economic structures that influence regulations and incentives for different types of energy, transportation, and housing policy, as well as the reach of advertising to different regions and social groups.
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prominent scenarios range from a decade to a century. Two important goals of scenario making are transparency (explicit reviewable assumptions)
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• Specifying the ways in which population, technology, affluence, preferences, policies, and other forces interact to change the rates of environmentally significant consumption in high-consuming developed economies and particularly in developing economies, where large increases in consumption are anticipated. • Identifying and quantifying important sources of variation in the adoption of environmentally beneficial technology among firms within industries.
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regional level, and the recognition that changes in social systems may be more important than changes in natural systems in determining the impacts of drought and other climatic shifts, reoriented the Working Group 2 of the second IPCC assessment to pay more attention to vulnerability assessment. For example, rapid increases in water demand have increased drought vulnerability, and the spread of urban settlements into coastal and flood-prone regions has increased vulnerability to sea level rise and severe storms.
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• The consequences of environmental change depend as much on the social systems that produce vulnerability as on the biophysical systems that cause environmental change. • The consequences of environmental change are strongly dependent on the ability of people and social systems to adapt; consequently, access to economic resources is a key mediator between environmental changes and their impacts.
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scientists can apply archeological and historical techniques to examine the human dimensions of these events. Insights from natural hazards research also have great relevance to understanding the consequences of climate variability.74 In the immediate aftermath of floods, hurricanes, and fires, social cohesion increases, and buildings and services tend to be restored with much greater speed than they were originally developed.
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droughts associated with El Niño indicate the potential value of forecasts to food security.77 Important insights and findings from this area of research thus include the following: the vulnerability of a society and of its hazard management systems is often more important than the magnitude of a climatic event in determining impacts on people, and past climatic variations may have been associated with large-scale abandonment of human settlements and major migrations. More information is needed about the following issues: the consequences of newly identified rapid climate changes of the past and the ability of hazard and resource management institutions to respond to surprising shifts in climate and to seasonal forecasts.
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conflict and security. More research is needed to accomplish a related goal: providing careful empirical analysis of the relative roles of environmental change and other factors affecting conflict and migration.
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• Several systematic difficulties exist in changing the behavior of specific targeted nation states, even when policies are backed up with financial resources.84 • Policy is often strongly path dependent in that early decisions may constrain or determine later ones, thus making discussion of alternative policies extremely difficult at later stages.85 • Transnational networks of scientists can play a strong role in early definition and framing of an issue, although they have only limited ability to motivate international agreement or to influence the interpretation of scientific knowledge by political decision makers.86 • Assessment of risks and response options tends to follow, rather than lead, political target setting, and the range of options tends to contract over time.87 • Coercive sanctions have limited effectiveness in enforcing compliance, compared with carefully designed, linked systems involving rule design, information provision, granting of capacity and legal authority to selected actors, and transparent processes of implementation distributed among multiple formal and informal institutions.88 Knowledge is not yet adequate to achieve the following: • Identify specific combinations of policy instruments and monitoring strategies that will induce a broad range of actors to behave in ways that lead to achieving internationally agreed-upon goals. • Identify specific international and national institutions that can effectively link the international, national, and local levels and make it possible to design effective and acceptable policies.
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not otherwise penalized by the market. These so-called externalities are a major source of environmental stress.
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• The development of the beginnings of a body of knowledge about how particular institutional types can effectively sustain resources. • Recognition of the importance of locally based and self-organized institutions for monitoring and controlling resource use.
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account the value of resources that have no market price? How do and how should societies allocate resources between present and future generations?
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satisfactory practical value, analysis must develop to the point at which it can give confidence in the validity of particular analytical techniques for estimating nonmarket values and provide a satisfactory way of analyzing equity issues, particularly those relating to intergenerational equity. Understanding Risk, Uncertainty, and Complex Choices Responding to the prospect of global change requires interventions in complex systems that are not fully understood.
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decision process and some important related research questions have been identified.112 The decision process is also a major concern of the new National Center for Environmental Decision Making Research, established by NSF. Additionally, research has begun to illuminate how scientific and technical information is incorporated into environmental decision making at local, national, and international levels.113 A number of important findings have been made in this research area: • Whereas many risk assessments consider only a few dimensions of risk (e.g., mortality risk, economic loss)
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regard to what is integrated and how, recent practice in the area of climate change has been rather narrow. Integration can mean "end-to-end" connection of a causal chain from fossil fuel emissions and land use to their impacts, with weighing of climate change impacts against measures to reduce them or to adapt.
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sessment projects have a national to global scale, rather coarse spatial and sectoral resolution, and weak representation of policies and political processes. Early work on integrated assessment of climate change combined energyeconomic models with either accounting or input-output systems to develop comprehensive emissions scenarios or with simple highly parameterized atmospheric models to project the effect of specific economic and control scenarios on atmospheric trace gas concentrations.118 More recent projects have added climate and impacts modules.
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Important advances in knowledge from integrated assessment modeling include the following: • The finding that socioeconomic uncertainties dominate biophysical uncertainties in contributing to aggregate uncertainty about future climate impacts and preferable response strategies.123 • Initial quantitative estimates of the benefits available from various levels of international cooperation to manage climate change. • An evaluation of the implications of sulfate aerosols in climate change for alternative abatement strategies.
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Public Attitudes and Values Public support is necessary for any collective response to global environmental threats, whether through policy decisions or the aggregated actions of large numbers of individuals and organizations. A series of studies shows strong and persistent concern and support for environmental quality and protection in a variety of countries, rich.and poor;125 in the United States and other countries where relevant data are available, this support cuts across socioeconomic lines.
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action on emerging global environmental issues as a function of new scientific knowledge. Individual and Household Behavior Household consumption of energy and certain materials is important both in causing and in responding to global change.
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• Project environmentally significant consumption in developing countries as a function of economic, demographic, and other changes. • Model the causes and trajectories of environmentally significant household consumption other than energy.
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mation of Eastern European economies. These economies had previously been among the most energy and pollution intensive in the world.
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ber of births per woman) have received the most research and policy attention, with Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America being the areas of interest.
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Knowledge is not yet adequate to estimate the environmental effects of particular types of migration or to model environmental impacts as a function of household size and composition as distinct from population effects. Technological Change A major source of uncertainty in projecting future human contributions to global change and analyzing response costs is the rate at which improved technology will lead to the substitution of abundant natural resources for scarce ones and of reproducible capital for depletable resources.
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