Human Dimensions Of Climate Change Research Articles

Local studies provide a global perspective of the impacts of climate change on Indigenous Peoples and local communities

Indigenous Peoples and local communities with nature-dependent livelihoods are disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, but their experience, knowledge and needs receive inadequate attention in climate research and policy. Here, we discuss three key findings of a collaborative research consortium arising from the Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts project. First, reports of environmental change by Indigenous Peoples and local communities provide holistic, relational, placed-based, culturally-grounded and multi-causal understandings of change, largely focused on processes and elements that are relevant to local livelihoods and cultures. These reports demonstrate that the impacts of climate change intersect with and exacerbate historical effects of socioeconomic and political marginalization. Second, drawing on rich bodies of inter-generational knowledge, Indigenous Peoples and local communities have developed context-specific responses to environmental change grounded in local resources and strategies that often absorb the impacts of multiple drivers of change. Indigenous Peoples and local communities adjust in diverse ways to impacts on their livelihoods, but the adoption of responses often comes at a significant cost due to economic, political, and socio-cultural barriers operating at societal, community, household, and individual levels. Finally, divergent understandings of change challenge generalizations in research examining the human dimensions of climate change. Evidence from Indigenous and local knowledge systems is context-dependent and not always aligned with scientific evidence. Exploring divergent understandings of the concept of change derived from different knowledge systems can yield new insights which may help prioritize research and policy actions to address local needs and priorities.

Local reports of climate change impacts in Sierra Nevada, Spain: sociodemographic and geographical patterns

While we know that climate change is having different impacts on various ecosystems and regions of the world, we know less how the perception of such impacts varies within a population. In this study, we examine patterns of individual variation in climate change impacts reports using data from a sample (n = 238) drawn from 33 mountainous municipalities of Sierra Nevada, Spain. Sierra Nevada inhabitants report multiple climate change impacts, being the most frequently reported changes in snowfall and snow cover, abundance of terrestrial fauna, freshwater availability, and extreme temperatures. Reports of climate change impacts vary according to informants’ sociodemographic characteristics and geographical location. People with life-long bonds with the environment and higher connection and dependence upon ecosystem services report more climate change impacts than other informants, as do people with lower level of schooling. We also found that reports of climate change impacts vary according to geographic areas, which reinforces the idea that climate change generates differentiated impacts even at small geographical scales. Understanding intracultural variation in reports of climate change impacts not only gives an enriched picture of the human dimensions of climate change but might also help design more targeted mitigation and adaptation responses.

Introduction

Introduction

Development and Expansion in the Marine Social Sciences: Insights from the Global Community

Increasing recognition of the human dimensions of climate change, pollution, exploitation, and other threats to the marine environment has resulted in an expansion of marine social science research in recent years. The importance of understanding the complexities of societal relationships with our global ocean, seas and coasts, and how this might influence sustainable management and effective and equitable governance, will be crucial to address the challenges facing our marine systems. Given their growing importance, this paper seeks to undertake a global assessment of the current status and trends in marine social science research and outline the next steps and key directions for the field. Specifically, by adapting established horizon scanning methods, we conduct a survey of the global marine social science research and practitioner community. We find that current research within the marine social sciences is broad, and focused on themes relating to (but not limited to) governance and decision-making, stakeholder participation and engagement, the socio-cultural dimensions of marine systems, ocean literacy, community-based and area-specific management, and the blue economy. We also identify priorities for future research, for example, relating to aspects of social justice, welfare and equity in relation to the use and governance of marine systems, blue growth and the expansion of marine industries, and enhancing ocean literacy to build ocean stewardship and citizenship. Our results, however, suggest several barriers that may prevent the extent to which the marine social sciences can continue to expand and develop in these directions. Barriers include, but are not limited to, the relationship between marine social sciences and other disciplines (i.e. lack of acceptance of marine social science as a legitimate discipline) and the visibility and recognition of marine social science both internal and external to academia (e.g. by policy-makers and practitioners). Finally, we identify a series of enablers for overcoming the barriers identified (e.g. promoting marine social sciences, engaging stakeholders and enlisting champions and building interdisciplinary teams). In doing so, this paper generates prospective thinking and highlights recommendations for effective marine social science research and practice, as well as the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration into the future.

The nature, significance, and influence of perceived personal experience of climate change

AbstractFollowing a previous 2014 review of perceived personal experience of climate change, the authors review relevant research published or reported between January 2014 and mid‐year 2019. The review findings suggest that the nature, significance, and influence of perceived personal experience of natural environment changes, conditions, and events deemed to be likely consequences of global climate change have been problematically conceptualized, researched, reported, and understood by many climate change scientists and by reporters of climate change science and their audiences. The nature, psychological significance, and psychological adaptation and issue engagement influence of personal experience of perceived environmental manifestations of climate change are arguably central considerations with respect to the human dimensions of climate change. These matters encompass public understanding of climate change science, both internal and external adaptation processes, and the psychological impacts of the ongoing stressor of climate change. They also affect issue engagement and behavioral change. It is increasingly necessary that existing issues with discipline‐based assumptive worlds, constructs and measures—and often unclear research and policy questions and objectives—be identified, clarified, and addressed. This particularly matters when researchers and policy makers are addressing public risk perceptions, understandings, and responses to global climate change, ideally to inform and enhance policies directed at climate change mitigation and adaptation, or, alternatively framed, directed towards public issue engagement and ‘psychologically significant’ as well as ‘environmentally significant’ behavioral change.This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Perceptions of Climate Change

Small-scale private forest ownership: Understanding female and male forest owners' climate change adaptation behaviour

We study the human dimensions of climate change and adaptation of Austrian small-scale private forest owners. The project focused on the human dimensions of climate change and adaptation of Austrian small-scale private forest owners to climate change. In Austria, approximately 95,000 forest owners manage roughly 56% of the forest area with individual properties covering less than 5 ha. Due to changing family structures and traditions, the number of female forest owners is increasing. This study is therefore primarily interested in the decision-making processes of female respondents. The findings are based on a survey, which applied a choice experiment (CE) to investigate forest owners' perceptions of climate change, their motivation for forest ownership and their planned management behaviour under conditions of climate change. Overall, a total of 919 forest owners participated in the questionnaire, 20% of which were female participants from all over Austria. Female forest owners were analysed in comparison to their male counterparts, focussing on the duration of forest ownership, motivation and their preferred forest tending and maintenance approaches. Furthermore, we analysed the likelihood of female participants to apply climate change adaptation strategies in their forests. The findings reveal significant differences and demonstrate that tailored approaches are required when reaching out to females in order to influence their decision-making processes. Therefore, new approaches are necessary, which are specifically addressed to female small-scale private forest owners.

Does Awareness of Climate Change Lead to Worry? Exploring Community Perceptions Through Parallel Analysis in Rural Himalaya

Human dimensions of climate change (HDCC) research overwhelmingly presents community perspectives on climate change and its impacts through single epistemic frameworks. This limits the possible platforms that community voices can access within scientific scholarship. Many HDCC interdisciplinary collaborations pursue the goal of data triangulation and attempt to address complex social–ecological problems through analytical integration. This raises questions about the comparative validity of different epistemologies and often leads to unequal power sharing between the different disciplinary practitioners. Our research addresses both of these issues by operationalizing a plural epistemological framework that depends on parallel analysis. This framework consists of a quantitative approach, inspired by hazards theory and land-change science research, and a qualitative approach, from political ecology. We explored perceptions of climate change in rural households in Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayan region. While the results reveal a high awareness of climate change within the community, most individuals and households do not consider the impacts of climate change to be a significant worry. The results for each approach complement each other. They provide the community with more than one platform to voice their experiences and reveal the complex relationships producing climate change knowledge in the region. Future research should attempt such parallel analysis in other locations to validate its utility in addressing issues of equity and marginalization between research epistemologies, as well as between experts and local communities.

Contemporary climatic analogs for 540 North American urban areas in the late 21st century

A major challenge in articulating human dimensions of climate change lies in translating global climate forecasts into impact assessments that are intuitive to the public. Climate-analog mapping involves matching the expected future climate at a location (e.g., a person’s city of residence) with current climate of another, potentially familiar, location - thereby providing a more relatable, place-based assessment of climate change. For 540 North American urban areas, we used climate-analog mapping to identify the location that has a contemporary climate most similar to each urban area’s expected 2080’s climate. We show that climate of most urban areas will shift considerably and become either more akin to contemporary climates hundreds of kilometers away and mainly to the south or will have no modern equivalent. Combined with an interactive web application, we provide an intuitive means of raising public awareness of the implications of climate change for 250 million urban residents.

A critical political ecology of human dimensions of climate change: Epistemology, ontology, and ethics

To understand the broader epistemological and ontological politics of human dimensions of climate change, this review adopts a political ecology approach, informed by Science and Technology Studies concepts and research on multiple ontologies. We are particularly interested in assessing critical approaches to climate change knowledge as related to adaptation policies. The review addresses three specific areas where more critical engagement could help move debates about knowledge politics in human dimensions research forward in fruitful ways: first, discourse and a focus on the language used to talk about and reflect on human dimensions of climate change; second, co‐production and the troubling proliferation of depoliticized “instrumental” co‐productions of knowledge for adaptation; and third, the emerging literature on multiple ontologies exposing multiple enactments of climate change processes. We review each of these areas of literature, highlighting where more direct engagement with epistemological, ontological, and ethical questions is underway. In doing so, we subject the knowledge and practices that underlie dominant understandings of climate change to critical political ecology scrutiny.This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge

Lessons for the anthropocene from the recent past: Tobacco use, HIV/AIDS, and social transformation

In light of the dilemma of global climate change that we have presented ourselves with in the twenty-first century and beyond, many researchers express despair at the ability of humans and societies to change behavior. The paper identifies how global humanity at individual, institutional, and governmental levels have addressed life-threatening dangers in the recent past and begun processes of long-term corrective action. The paper thus discusses global social transformations from the recent past in regards to tobacco use and HIV/AIDS, to think about how Hannah Arendt's concept of the Polis detailed in The Human Condition (1958) may be engaged to address the human dimensions of climate change. As an output of the Andrew W. Mellon European Observatory of the New Human Condition, this paper's focus is commensurate with the thrust of this special issue of Global and Planetary Change which considers climate change to be more of a crisis in the human condition than an environmental problem. Arendt's concept of the Polis provides a framework for a better understanding of change in behavior, preference and motivation. We argue that her perspectives are central to developing multi and inter-disciplinary humanities, social science, science and business perspectives to mobilize collective human action towards adapting to and mitigating the social and environmental threats of global climate change.

Human dimensions of environmental change in small island developing states: some common themes

Climate change and its consequence of sea level rise are major issues for small island developing states (SIDS), as they worsen many other pressures on their people and their environment. Accordingly, articles in this special issue of Regional Environmental Change on SIDS address research gaps in the following thematic areas of the human dimensions of climate change. (1) Islander perceptions of climate change and the information sources on which these are based. (2) Migration to richer countries, which dominates popular media articles, so that scholars from a wide range of disciplines have given their perspectives on it. For many SIDS, however, relocation within that country is much more of an issue, but little studied as yet. (3) Community-based adaptation, a theme which only rarely appears in peer-reviewed journals. (4) National, regional and international policies and the effectiveness of their implementation. (5) Social and cultural issues arising from the above. This paper provides an overview of these and some related themes of importance to SIDS, including ocean acidification and land degradation. Researchers based in the SIDS and regional organisations have an important role in recognising these issues and in developing the local skills base needed to deal with them. The Paris Agreement of 2015 is a positive (but as yet inadequate) step towards the international action on climate change that SIDS need.

Reply to 'Broaden research on the human dimensions of climate change'

Reply to 'Broaden research on the human dimensions of climate change'

Method, Measurement, and Management in IPCC Climate Modeling

The IPCC is the world’s leading scientific body addressing climate change, but there is growing dissatisfaction with its heavily economic and econometric approach to analyzing the climate-relevant aspects of human thought and behavior. This article documents and discusses the problem before sketching two examples of how other cultural domains besides the economic—the political and cosmological—might be incorporated into modeling the human dimensions of climate change. In conclusion, the article deploys these examples to explore why the IPCC has been reluctant to model non-economic realms of culture. The results underscore the importance of Victor’s (Nature 520:27–29, 2015) call for a parallel global mechanism to address the IPCC’s evasion of controversial policy-relevant questions.

Broaden research on the human dimensions of climate change

Broaden research on the human dimensions of climate change

The evolving and increasing need for climate change research on the oceans

Abstract The 3rd International Symposium on the Effects of Climate Change on the World's Oceans was held in Santos, Brazil, in March 2015, convened by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES), and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC), and organized locally by the Oceanographic Institute, University of Sao Paulo (IO-USP). The symposium was designed to do two things. First, to get updates on new scientific developments that would address recognized uncertainties that remained from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report and to contribute to building bridges between research in the natural and social sciences in respect to the human dimensions of climate change, with a focus on coastal communities, management objectives, governance and adaptation measures. The choice of the venue in Santos, Brazil, was aimed to stimulate and widen this thematic discussion in Latin America and southern Atlantic regions, where there still are important knowledge gaps and scientific, politic and societal challenges to be overcome. The meeting was attended by 280 participants from 38 countries, contributing 336 oral and poster presentations. This paper summarizes the main outcomes of the symposium and introduces a number of papers submitted to this special issue.

Climate vulnerability as a relational concept

Within the rapidly expanding literature on the human dimensions of climate change, the ways in which the term vulnerability is used have proliferated. With the increasing influence of the concepts of adaptation and social resilience, there has been the tendency to treat vulnerability as a characteristic of individuals or social groups. In this respect, various quantitative measures of poverty are used as indicators of vulnerability. These approaches run counter to approaches that embrace context and most importantly the social relations that shape the multidimensionality of vulnerability. This paper engages these different viewpoints by juxtaposing the wealth trajectories of the members of 54 households in western Niger from 1984–1994 with an understanding of the changing social relations among these individuals gained from surveys and open-ended interviews of household members. Data analysis shows that poverty alone is an incomplete measure of an individual or household’s vulnerability to loss due not only to the randomness of biophysical hazard but also to different obligations and entitlements attached to wealth. Shifts in wealth following the historic drought of 1984, were more related to longer-term changes in social relations tied to recurrent drought during and before the study period than to the 1984 “trigger” itself. Women and junior men gained wealth relative to senior men. The gains in wealth among women do not reflect their lower vulnerability compared to senior men but rather, their reactions to address their vulnerable positions. In this way, measures of poverty, uninformed by an understanding the changing qualitative nature of social relations, are poor measures of vulnerability in the Sahelian region.

The human dimensions of climate change: A micro-level assessment of views from the ecological modernization, political economy and human ecology perspectives

Understanding the manifold human and physical dimensions of climate change has become an area of great interest to researchers in recent decades. Using a U.S. nationally-representative data set and drawing on the ecological modernization, political economy, and human ecology perspectives, this study examines the impacts of energy efficiency technologies, affluence, household demographics, and biophysical characteristics on residential CO2 emissions. Overall, the study provides mixed support for the ecological modernization perspective. While several findings are consistent with the theory's expectation that modern societies can harness technology to mitigate human impacts on the environment, others directly contradict it. Also, the theory's prediction of an inverted U-shaped relationship between affluence and environmental impacts is contradicted. The evidence is somewhat more supportive of the political economy and human ecology perspectives, with affluence, some indicators of technology, household demographics, and biophysical characteristics emerging as important drivers of residential CO2 emissions.

Exploring multiple ontologies of drought in agro‐pastoral regions of Northern Tanzania: a topological approach

There has been increased focus within the human dimensions of climate change on understanding the complex and multiple ways of ‘knowing’ climate. While these discussions are important in recognising different ways of knowing the climate and climate change processes already underway, we argue that this epistemological approach is limited and challenging. It begins with an assumption that there is one world (climate) out there that can just be known differently, and that knowledge can be isolated from ways of being and acting in the world. This often results in a distilling of complex knowledge practices into information for the purposes of integration. Drawing from a material‐semiotic approach from Science and Technology Studies (STS), we propose a shift of focus to ontology, with an emphasis on the enactment of knowledge and reality (climate) simultaneously. We present ethnographic data from two drought events (2008/2009 and 2010/2011) among Maasai pastoralists in Northern Tanzania in East Africa to illustrate the value of such an approach, using multiple topologies (regional, network, fluid) for thinking through and following multiple enactments of drought in practice.

Climate change influences on environment as a determinant of Indigenous health: Relationships to place, sea ice, and health in an Inuit community

This paper contributes to the literature on Indigenous health, human dimensions of climate change, and place-based dimensions of health by examining the role of environment for Inuit health in the context of a changing climate. We investigated the relationship between one key element of the environment – sea ice – and diverse aspects of health in an Inuit community in northern Canada, drawing on population health and health geography approaches. We used a case study design and participatory and collaborative approach with the community of Nain in northern Labrador, Canada. Focus groups (n = 2), interviews (n = 22), and participant observation were conducted in 2010–11. We found that an appreciation of place was critical for understanding the full range of health influences of sea ice use for Inuit. Negative physical health impacts were reported on less frequently than positive health benefits of sea ice use, which were predominantly related to mental/emotional, spiritual, social, and cultural health. We found that sea ice means freedom for sea ice users, which we suggest influences individual and collective health through relationships between sea ice use, culture, knowledge, and autonomy. While sea ice users reported increases in negative physical health impacts such as injuries and stress related to changing environmental conditions, we suggest that less tangible climate change impacts related to losses of health benefits and disruptions to place meanings and place attachment may be even more significant. Our findings indicate that climate change is resulting in and compounding existing environmental dispossession for Inuit. They also demonstrate the necessity of considering place meanings, culture, and socio-historical context to assess the complexity of climate change impacts on Indigenous environmental health.

Water Crisis in India: Cross-Currents of Tradition, Nationalism and Globalization

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsNeeraj VedwanNeeraj Vedwan is associate professor of anthropology at Montclair State University. He does research in environmental anthropology, specifically the human dimensions of climate change, consumerism and water resources management. His writing appears in anthropological and interdisciplinary journals, including Cultural Anthropology, Natural Hazards and Human Organization.