Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Research Pathways for the Next Decade (1999) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 45-64
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IHDP. Environmental data must be integrated with social datasets already archived by organizations such as the Institute for Cooperative Programs in Survey Research or by researchers who maintain their own distributional mechanisms.
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framework of causes, consequences, and responses used in human dimensions research (see Table 7.5)
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through its effect on those systems, threatens human health, welfare, or other things people value.''152 Environmentally significant consumption and direct alterations of biological systems are the two main ways in which humanity affects the global environment. Currently, the most environmentally significant consumption from a global perspective consists of the major activities that burn fossil fuels (e.g., travel, space heating and cooling, electricity production, industrial process heating)
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• What are the constituents and determinants of energy use and other environmentally significant consumption in countries and populations at different levels of economic development? • How is consumption likely to change with increasing affluence in lowincome countries and populations and does this change always follow the path that high-income countries and populations have followed?
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• Promote more realistic analyses of the policy options for achieving national and international targets (e.g., limitation of greenhouse gas emissions, control of regional air quality, more efficient use of water resources) , taking into account knowledge about public acceptability and the requirements of successful implementation.
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• What factors determine the rate at which production costs of an environmentally benign technology decline as output increases? • What have been the effects of prescriptive standards, best-availabletechnology rules, public recognition, and awards to encourage voluntary technology adoption and other technology-related environmental policy instruments on actual rates of innovation?
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seasonal to interannual climate predictions and to understand decadal to centennial shifts and changes in climate. An important intellectual shift in climate impact assessment in recent years has been an increased focus on understanding vulnerability and adaptation.
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tion with those producing the predictions. As understanding and predictability extend to new regions, lead times, and levels of certainty, human dimensions research can provide important insights into local vulnerability and policy contexts as well as into human needs and responses to improved climate information.
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Social and Environmental Surprises Natural science research has identified and is evaluating several kinds of rapid and discontinuous environmental changes that might overwhelm human adaptive capacities, at least in some localities. They include rapid climate change events (as from a major disturbance of the North Atlantic Oscillation)
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• How have environmental and social surprises interacted? • Which human activities (e.g., patterns of land use and management, chemical releases)
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be seen from the following observations: international agreements set targets without much consideration to what is feasible; governments often set resource extraction limits at unsustainable levels; national policies often appear to local resource managers to be part of the problem; techniques for estimating the full social costs of natural resource consumption rarely result in either social consensus or policy decisions; institutional change often has unforeseen or unfair distributional impacts; and even when there is widespread agreement about a global change phenomenon among specialists, many people perceive a high level of scientific disagreement. Such difficulties afflict resource management institutions at levels from local to international.
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lems and links among international, national, and local levels; theoretical studies of the bargaining, contracting, and principal-agent aspects of implementing commitments at higher levels by delegating substantial authority to lower-level agents (e.g., tradable permit systems, joint implementation, federal systems) ; institutional and political study of the applicability of institutions at lower levels of organization to the design of national and international policy instruments; quasi-experimental studies, case comparisons, and simulation studies of the effects of major changes in institutions and rules, based in part on data from archival records and the recollections of participants; and small-scale simulations and experiments.
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and other factors, interact in the calculus that people use in making decisions about resource use. One of the current challenges in understanding land use change, as well as changes in the use of water, marine ecosystems, and other resources, is characterizing the role of population in environmental change and degradation.
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process. Methodological aspects of geo-links to biophysical data are currently being worked out.
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the planet;158 it can also make use of Earth-observing satellites that offer 1-to 3m resolution and that facilitate observation, archiving, and analysis of human impacts at that scale. Success will depend on collaboration between social scientists and physical scientists in developing better algorithms for analyzing the large datasets provided by fine-resolution satellites to address behavioral questions.159 Use of remotely sensed data at this fine scale will require attention to confidentiality in archiving and can benefit from past experience with social data.160 Over the next 5 to 10 years research on land use issues can be expected to meet a number of goals: • Development of datasets and comparative empirical studies on the social causes and consequences of land use and land cover change in different regions that will permit improved understanding of the relative roles of population dynamics, economics, and other factors in driving environmental change.
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understanding environmental choices and thus guide scientists toward generating decision-relevant information. Over the next decade this research field should address a number of questions: • Are there ways to improve economic assessments of the costs, benefits, and distributional effects of forecasted climate changes and variations, taking adaptive capacity into account?
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those values. Research to improve decision making processes will use case studies and comparisons of existing systems that inform management decisions and will conduct experiments and simulations to test alternative processes, particularly methods that involve broadly based deliberative processes, for informing scientists about decision participants' information needs and for informing policy debates.
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making processes that result in the control of these emissions (e.g., the Montreal Protocol and its implementation)
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panels, interagency collaborations, and research driven by specific science plans and organized in centers of excellence to advance human dimensions research. There are good models provided by the now-defunct human dimensions review panel at NSF, the recent Human Dimensions Centers and Methods and Models in Integrated Assessment initiatives, and the joint NSF-EPA partnerships in environmental research.
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Assuming the requisite geographical linkage data are obtained, the issue of protecting the confidentiality of respondents arises. Below the country or perhaps provincial scale, virtually all social science data are obtained with the promise of protecting the confidentiality of individuals, households, organizations, and often communities.
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