Toward an Understanding of Global Change Initial Priorities for U.S. Contributions to the International Geosphere - Biosphere Program (1988) / Chapter Skim
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The Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change
The Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change
Pages 134-200
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From page 134... ...
The Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change COORDINATOR: W1~1AM C CLARK CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Goals for research on the human dimensions of global change, 137 Goal and organization of this paper, 137 PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS OF THE HUMAN SYSTEM INVOLVED IN GLOBAL CHANGE Interactions, 139 Choice, 143 Culture, 148 UNRESOLVED QUESTIONS Human sources of global change, 152 Human consequences of global change, 159 Human management of global change, 168 SELECTED RESEARCH CHALLENGES Global land use change, 175 Industrial metabolism, 178 Usable knowledge of global change, 180 Institutions for management, 183 Documentation, 186 135 138 152 175 This paper was compiled by committee member William C
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Vernadsky and his predecessors had neither the data nor the instrumentation to convert their insights into useful analytical tools for (lescribing and understanding global interactions between environment and processes of human development.2 Over the last 50 years, however, and especially in the quarter century since the Tnternational Geophysical Year, the necessary measurements, models, and concepts have rapidly accumulated. We now know that human activities have fundamentally transformed the face of the earth, as well as the diversity en c!
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Applied assessments of environmental impacts, risk, and hazard also provide insights. And numerous works have examined the human causes or consequences of particular instances of large-scare environmental change.3 In addition, a growing interest in the human dimensions of global change has elicited over the last several years a number of symposia, workshop reports, and edited volumes (see Annex B)
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The question is, therefore, not whether, but only how the interactions between environmental and human systems should be studied in the context of the International GeosphereBiosphere Program. Goal and Organization of This Paper The goal of this paper is to articulate the principal issues and questions that should be addressed to assure effective integration of research on the human dimensions of global change within the U.S.
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In particular, the following section presents a broad overview of the principal elements involved in humans' interactions with the global environment. Some of the major unresolved questions regarding the character, causes, and consequences of those interactions are then summarized in the section on "unresolved questions," drawing upon the previously noted body of recent discussions on the human dimensions of global change.
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Sources In principle, human processes drive global change by altering the flows of energy and materials among components of the geospherebiosphere system (Orians, in press)
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. Within these broad categories, there is a need to identify which specific activities are most significantly implicated in existing global environmental changes, en c!
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Recent work on "total exposure assessment" to air pollutants has shown how misreading broad average exposure estimates can be (e.g., Ott, 1985; Smith, in press; SpenglLer and Soczek, 1984~. Concepts relating to heterogeneities in exposure and empirical estimates of such exposures will be central elements in an understanding of the human dimensions of global change (e.g., Vaupel and Yashin, 1986~.
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Human behavior can respond not only to actual environmental changes that have already occurred, but also to people's perceptions and assessments of possible future changes that they hope to encourage or avoid. This reflexive or anticipatory potential of human systems raises the prospect of 5 economists have devoted extensive attention to what Thomas Schelling (1978)
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. Coupled with broader studies in the behavioral sciences, decision analysis, and policymaking, th research on hazards suggests that three factors play significant roles in shaping human choices relating to environmental change: values, options, and perceptions.
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The options involved in human choices concerning global change can be grouped in three interrelated categories: technological, organizational, and economic. Technological options concern the alternative ways in which basic processes of resource use, manufacturing, service provision, and waste control can be carried out.
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Finally, a focus on economic options emphasizes the fundamental requirement that societies be able to afford choices undertaken in pursuit of their values. While maximizing efficiency may not always be an appropriate criterion for choice, even the most ardent conservationists are coming to realize that environmentally sustainable development must be economically sustainable as well (Madclen, 1987; WCED, 1987~.
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Culture Human interactions with the global environment, as well as human choices regarding environmental management, are ultimately grounded in a wealth of unclerlying social factors and historical contexts that might be called "culture." Patterns of global environmental change can be described without reference to cultural factors. But because of the integral role of human systems in the dynamics of global change, some understanding of why societies function as they do wiD be required for explaining and predicting interactions between people and their environments.
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(The cultural dimensions of environmental values and attitudes are also sure to be important, as noted earlier.) Populations Population characteristics are clearly among the most fundamental human dimensions of global change, with direct implications for resource use, waste production, and social vulnerability (Repetto, 1987~.
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Most organizational forms, over most of their history, have been preoccupied with more or less immediate goals of physical, economic, and spiritual security. It is only relatively recently that a few organizational structures have emerged with self-professed goals of environmental protection and environmentally sustainable development (Richards, 1986~.
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In general, efforts to understand the underTying cultural dimensions of global environmental change must also look to Tong-term, large-scale changes in how people produce and consume goods and services. Industrial and agricultural processes have for centuries been the human activities with the greatest consequences for environmental change.
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In preparing this discussion, an effort has been made to summarize and critically evaluate the main conclusions of the numerous recent workshops, symposia, and writings on the human dimensions of global change that were noted at the beginning of this paper. The results are presented below under three related headings: human sources, human consequences, and human management of global change.
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For a few aspects of global change like the greenhouse effect or stratospheric ozone depletion, this preliminary identification of "input" linkages between the human and other components of global change is relatively well in hand: research can confidently focus on a specific list of radiatively active trace gases and halocarbons. For most other aspects of global change, however, much basic research on human forcing of interactions with the environment needs to be done.
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How do these "intensive" relationships between human processes and material and energy flows vary across space, time, and culture? Answering these questions will require basic quantitative process studies on the transformation of human activity "inputs" such as coke production or rice paddy cultivation into "outputs" such as methane flux to the atmosphere.
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. Biomass Combustion X X X X Nitrogen Fertilizers X X Rice Paddy Cultivation X Ruminant Animal Grazing X MISCELLANEOUS Industrial uses, refrigerants, consumer products Landfills Oceans Wetlands X X X FIGURE 4 Human processes that force changes in selected dherrucal constituents of the atmospheric environment.
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How do these "extensive" measures of the human dimension of global change vary across space, time, and culture? Ultimately, the need is for something approaching a theory of world development, cast in terms appropriate to produce relevant human forcing functions needed for the understanding of global environmental change.
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2: A83) on the impact of world development on the atmosphere.
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Human Consequences of Global Change The complex processes involved in human responses to glob e] change were outlined above in the section on principal elements.
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Research to improve assessments is therefore central to an improved understanding of the interactions between human and environmental systems. Summarized below are the principal questions regarding assessment that should be addressed in the early stages of a research program on the human dimensions of global change.
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An excellent foundation for this task is provided by the recently published proceedings of the DahIem Conference on Wo rid Resources and Development (McLaren and Skinner, 1987~. This mammoth work brings together some of the best social and natural science thinking on specific interactions among environmental change, resource availability, and sustainable development.
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To date, however, most of the relatively few assessments that have addressed large-scare environmental changes have dealt with the relationships between single environmental components, e.g., acid (reposition, and single development sectors, e.g., forestry. Even the most ambitious works, for example, the National Research CounciT's and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's programs on environmental impacts of energy production, or the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment's program on climate impact assessment, have dealt only with the impacts of change in a single valued environmental component across a range of human activities, or the impacts of a single human activity across a range of valued environmental components (Brooks and HoBander, 1979; Kates et al., 1985; Torrens, 1984~.
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Finally, the values, options, and perceptions central to human choices regarding global change differ widely from place to place on earth. The uniqueness of and interactions among places are thus central to the human meaning of global change and to the prospects for managing sustainable development.
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Incorporating Values in Assessments of Global Change The values that figure so prominently in the determination of Stewart and Glantz (1985) have pointed out this difficulty in the ostensibly global climate impact assessment by the National Defense University.
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As noted earlier, experience in environmental impact assessment emphasizes the importance of focusing assessments on a relatively few "valued environmental components" like summer soil moisture or tropical species diversity (Beanlands and Duinker, 1983~. The list of components is always subject to revision, but efforts to include everything simply devalue everything.
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This raises a number of important value-related questions that should be addressed in research programs on the human dimensions of global change. For example, stuclies of human attitudes toward risk have shown that different individuals or organizations confronting the same objective uncertainties will place significantly different values on actions to remove the uncertainty or avoid its possible consequences.
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But increasing the range of management options, and characterizing their likely performance, should be a central focus for invention, imagination, and research applied to the human component of global change. The basic research challenge was set forth by the Ann Arbor workshop on an International Social Science Research Program on Global Change as follows: Human societies have at least some capacity to act on percept tions, to diminish the rate or even alter the course of their environmentally destructive activities.
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Turning to intentional use of technology to manage environmental change, options exist to eliminate atmospheric emissions of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel production (e.g., Haefele et al., 1986) and to radically reduce the danger posed by halocarbons to stratospheric ozone.
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Each country's management options are increasingly influenced and constrained by the institutions and policies of other countries. A dynamic, global perspective on the changing efficacy of alternative institutions for managing global change is therefore necessary, backed by appropriate comparative and historical research.
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to problems of international and global environmental degradation" (Jacobson and Shanks, 1987:29~? · What new international frameworks, such as the concept of a "planetary trust" developed by Edith Brown-Weiss in the context of U.N.
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A growing body of scholarship in economics, psychology, attitude change, communications networks, and social diffusion provides substantial foundations upon which the needed research can be built.24 With some exceptions, however, this work has tended to focus on the determinants and control of individual behaviors. Global change problems, in contrast, highlight the importance of collective action and organizational behavior in shaping Tong-term, large-scare interactions between people and the environment.25A fundamental challenge in studies of the human dimensions of global change is to work toward a theory of human system behavior that encompasses all these relevant levels of social organization.
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What, if any, is the distinctive role of "traditional" knowledge and practice in such cases? · Given that most global environmental changes are both long delayed and common-property in nature, an individual has limited incentive to change his or her own immediate behavior in ways to reduce those changes.
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to develop more completely and critically the detailed research plans that will required if these challenges are to be met. Global [and Use Change One major challenge for research on the human dimensions of global change is to build a better understanding of the processes underlying global land use change.
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Other factors and processes wouIcl be added to the conceptual mode] as the study matured.29 Excellent foundations for a conceptual model of the human dimensions of global land use change are provided by the recent publications of the DahIem Conference on resources and development and the SCOPE/TCSU land transformation project (McLaren and Skinner, 1987; Wolman and Fournier, 1987~.
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Finally, the fourth dimension of the study would involve the construction of future scenarios of global land use change, and exploration of how alternative human choices regarding global change would alter those scenarios. Reference scenarios of the kinds of patterns of land use change that might be associated with major alternative paths of world economic development are essential to the planning of natural science research and monitoring in the global change program.
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Studies related to the global land use project proposed here have recently been recommended by a number of groups.30 Industrial Metabolism A second major challenge for research on the human dimensions of global change is a better understanding of the "metabolism" of productive and consumptive processes through which industrial societies force changes in the earth's environment. As noted earlier, industrial civilization's transformations of material an ~ energy resources constitute major sources of global change.
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A materials and energy balance approach would be central to the study, which would seek to develop a rigorous and quantitative understanding of the production and consumption processes involved in transforming basic material flows relevant to global change. The specific categories of industrial activity considered in the study would be selected to provide the most useful interaction with the natural science components of the global change program.
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As noted above, technical information, popular perceptions, and fundamental values interact closely in shaping human choices. Unfortunately, research 32These include the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study initiative on human responses to global change (IFIAS, 1987)
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The first would be conceptual. Following proposals set forth by the U.S.-China Workshop on Human Dimensions of Global Change (Tang and Jacobson, 1988)
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Finally, the study would have a forward-Iooking dimension. This would seek to formulate recommendations regarding how the worId's rapidly growing technical knowledge regarding global change could be better assessed, formulated, and communicated so as to make a more useful contribution to relevant human choices being made around the world.
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, the U.S.-China Workshop on Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (Tang and Jacobson, 1988) , and the new SSRC program on global change (Rockwell and Kasperson, 1988~.
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There also exist a number of comparative studies examining different styles of environmental decision making at the national scale (e.g., Brickman et al., 1985; Enioe, 1975; Lun~qvist, 1980; Vogel, 1986~. backing, however, is a strategic or synoptic approach that puts these individual pieces into perspective, assesses their relevance and limitations with regard to the problem of managing sustainable development in the face of global change, and focuses attention on missing dimensions of present understanding.
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The recent report of the U.S.-China Workshop on Human Dimensions of Global Change provides a detailed discussion of how this conceptual framework might evolve (Tang and Jacobson, 1988~. The second phase of the study would involve comparative historical case studies of how institutional structures, interrelations, and performance have co-evolved in the course of humanity's efforts to come to terms with specific problems of long-term, large-scare environmental change.
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As noted earlier in this paper, environmental history studies have advanced significantly over the past decade, a.ncl are now beginning to produce quantitative global data on century-scare interactions of human activities and the environment. More such data will emerge in the course of the global change program, particularly in the context of the land use and industrial metabolism studies suggested above.
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In any case, however, the surveys will almost certainly be more illuminating if they are designed jointly by teams of scholars expert in both the environmental and the human dimensions of global change. REFERENCES Ayres, R
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1987. Human Dimensions of Global Change: The Challenge to the Humanities and the Social Sciences.
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Pp. 104-136 in Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, W
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Pp. 171-193 in Sustainable Development of the Biosphere, W
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1987. Conservation with Equity: Strategies for Sustainable Development.
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Pp. 511-528 in SCOPE 27: Climate Impact Assessment.
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1988. Proposal for a research planning and field development program: The social sciences and global environmental change.
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1988. Human dimensions of global environmental change: Proposals for research.
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1988. Scenarios of Socioeconomic Development for Studies of Global Environmental Change: A Critical Review.
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Department of Energy. ANNEX A: PROGRAMS ON THE HUMAN DIMENSIONS OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE: A PARTIAL LISTING [The purpose of this list is to encourage communication among the various institutional programs that are developing an explicit focus on the human dimensions of global environmental change.
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This task was facilitatecl by the many symposia, workshops, and studies on the human dimensions of global environmental change that the social science and engineering communities have recently conducted under impetus of the IGBP and its underlying themes. Instead of cluplicating the work of these activities through committee-sponsored workshops, committee members or staff participated directly in the following efforts: the Ann Arbor workshop on an "International Social Science Research Program on Global Change" (Jacobson and Shanks, 1987~; ~ the Clark University environmental history symposium on "The Earth as Transformed by Human Action" (O'Riordan, 1988a; Turner et al., in press)
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on "Human Response to Global Change" (IFlAS, 1987; IFlAS/ISSC/UNU, 1988~. In addition to this direct engagement, a number of recent reports prepared by other groups interested in the human dimensions of global change have been reviewed in preparing this paper.
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1988. Human dimensions of global environmental change: Proposals for research.
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The earth as transformed by hump action. Proceedings of an international symposium held at the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, Worcester, Mass, October 25-30, 1987.
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