Archive for the ‘social science’ Category
|Haiti’s story
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Little good news is coming out of Haiti these days. There’s a deep social-environmental history that needs to be explored to understand why crises like poverty, AIDS, mudslides, and this week’s earthquake have been so devastating to the Haitian people.
I have written a bit about this history for one of the book projects I’m working on. Below are a few excerpts, but before reading further, please consider helping with the humanitarian relief for earthquake victims:
- Doctors Without Borders USA
- AmeriCares
- An additional list of aid agencies can be found at the NY Times.
Tags: Haiti
Posted in conflict, energy, food and agriculture, health, nature and culture, population, race and class, risk analysis, social science | 2 Comments »
Extreme climate and the vulnerability of least-developed countries
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010
Happy New Year, everyone. Sorry for the lag in posts, but there wasn’t a lot happening in the news or journals over the past week.
A few years ago, I saw a talk by Thomas Schelling (Nobel laureate in economics) who argued that we need to accelerate the economic development of poor countries so that they are able to cope with climate change. This analysis is interesting, if not fraught with additional challenges, such as development in a carbon-based energy world hastening the very problem to which these nations are attempting to adapt.
In an article1 in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access), Anthony Patt and colleagues argued that the need for assistance by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) is dependent on vulnerability, which, in turn, depends on both exposure to climate change and how socioeconomic factors affect the sensitivity of LDCs to climate change.
To assess this hypothesis, they first examined how deaths caused by disasters (floods, droughts, and storms) varied across the level of development in several LDCs. They used the UN Human Development Index—HDI, a composite metric of income, education, and life expectancy—as a proxy for development.
Here’s what they found…
Posted in climate adaptation, climate economics, policy, race and class, risk analysis, social science, sustainable development | No Comments »
In this week’s issue of Nature: Rethinking global conservation
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Robert Smith and colleagues argue1 that it’s time to reorganize the approach to conservation in developing nations.
They are critical of academics and NGOs for missing what they think really matters—effective, on-the-ground research and policy development with strong local participation and buy in.
Part of this stems from the focus of academics. They cite as an example the work of Norman Myers and Conservation International, who published a now-famous map of biodiversity hotspots.
The map was marketed as a tool for identifying where conservation investment would have the biggest impact, but this involved playing down both how little was actually known about species distributions and that accurate global data sets on the costs of implementation were not available.
These limitations did not stop the map doing its main job, which was to raise funds and show broadly where Conservation International should target its efforts. In fact, the initiative has been extremely successful and helped to raise an estimated US$750 million for conservation within hot spots. But the hype led many academics to treat priority area setting as simply a question of working out what lives where. This led to many studies that took no account of how plans are implemented.
And part of it stems from traditional structures of NGOs, which, in Smith’s words,
[facilitates] the need to create a sense of urgency among donors lead[ing] to short-term funding and ‘quick and dirty’ projects, which rarely gain local long-term support. Second, NGOs tend to advocate their institutional methodology, rather than allowing local agencies to develop approaches that best match their needs. Third, NGO researchers find it easier to produce articles on broad-scale issues for high-impact journals, which helps to build scientific support for new campaigns, than to write papers about research on local issues.
What’s the new approach they advocate?
Posted in biodiversity science, community conserved areas, nature and culture, social science | No Comments »
Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 4: Political-economic context
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Overview
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 2: Communication
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 3: Personal perceptions, values, and behaviors.
People often disengage from environmental issues because of a sense of disenfranchisement: “What kind of difference can I make? Not much, so why bother? We need big changes and soon. The power to do this is controlled by politicians, who are influenced (financially and otherwise) by Big Business often intent on blocking change.”
In a series of provocative articles in Energy Policy1, Gregory Unruh posed two questions to help us unravel forces at the root of this problem:
- If [renewable energy] technologies exist, are cost effective, and help minimize climate-forcing emissions, why aren’t they diffusing more rapidly?
- Furthermore, why aren’t government policies to promote them, about which there is substantial scientific and social consensus, more aggressive or effective?
The answer he suggests is carbon lock in. What is it? How has it become major inertia to change by reinforcing power structures in society, business, and politics?
Tags: carbon lock in
Posted in behavior, climate economics, policy, social science, technology, transportation | 5 Comments »
Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 3: Personal perception, values, and behavior
Friday, November 6th, 2009
Prerequisite posts:
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Overview
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 1: Environmental Literacy
- Why don’t people engage climate change? Problem 2: Communication
In earlier posts, we examined climate change engagement as problems of environmental literacy and communication. There is no doubt we can do better with both of these. But as we will see, proponents of environmental literacy and communication make a mistake if they believe engagement is simply a matter of getting more information to people. Science, it is believed, will speak for itself.
Unfortunately, it often doesn’t.
A political scientist recently told me that before the age of 25, people use information to shape their value system and perceptions of the world. After 25, they start cherry picking information that simply reinforces these beliefs (hence the world of cable news).
Although this is is a rough generalization, it suggests that a person’s values development may have a shelf life. It also reveals why issues like climate change may not resonate with people cut from certain ideological cloths—no matter how much information they encounter.
The psychology, sociology, and ethics literature has a lot to say about this problem. For simplicity, I want to pull out four challenges I think are among the most common and important with respect to climate change…
Posted in behavior, climate skeptics deniers and contrarians, communication and framing, environmentalism, gender, nature and culture, race and class, religion, social science, sustainability | 7 Comments »
Chicago 1995: How social disparities lead to environmental disasters
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
As I mentioned in the last post, heat waves have the potential to harm or kill a lot of people. Who are the people most likely to suffer first? The experiences from the Chicago 1995 heat wave offer some insights for urban America. Eric Klinenberg’s 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is as relevant as ever to the current conversation about climate change.
Some excerpts from a U. Chicago Press interview with Klinenberg.
The heat made the city’s roads buckle. Train rails warped, causing long commuter and freight delays. City workers watered bridges to prevent them from locking when the plates expanded. Children riding in school buses became so dehydrated and nauseous that they had to be hosed down by the Fire Department. Hundreds of young people were hospitalized with heat-related illnesses. But the elderly, and especially the elderly who lived alone, were most vulnerable to the heat wave.
“It’s hot,” the mayor told the media. “But let’s not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.” Many local journalists shared Daley’s skepticism, and before long the city was mired in a callous debate over whether the so-called heat deaths were—to use the term that recurred at the time—”really real.”
[T]he black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1.
Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths…Chicago’s Latinos tend to live in neighborhoods with high population density, busy commercial life in the streets, and vibrant public spaces. Most of the African American neighborhoods with high heat wave death rates had been abandoned—by employers, stores, and residents—in recent decades. The social ecology of abandonment, dispersion, and decay makes systems of social support exceedingly difficult to sustain.
The heat wave was a particle accelerator for the city: It sped up and made visible the hazardous social conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Yes, the weather was extreme. But the deep sources of the tragedy were the everyday disasters that the city tolerates, takes for granted, or has officially forgotten.
Related Post: Say so long to your furnace and hello to a new air conditioner
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paraflyer/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Posted in climate adaptation, environmental justice, race and class, social science, urban | 3 Comments »
Defining the good life in Baltimore
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009
Defining and describing what constitutes “the good life” for individuals and communities has been a vexing challenge for social scholars…
So begins a recent article1,2 in Environment and Behavior (subscription required)
…[T]he term “life satisfaction”, which comes from the psychological literature, refers to the cognitive evaluation of one’s happiness or subjective wellbeing and involves comparing the fulfillment of individual needs, goals, and aspirations to a meaningful standard.
One unique aspect of this study was that the team used surveys to assess people’s life satisfaction at two different scales: (1) their own lives and (2) their neighborhoods.
Bottom line:
- Income and home ownership mattered more to individual satisfaction compared to satisfaction with neighborhoods.
- In contrast, neighborhood satisfaction was more strongly correlated with social capital (shared knowledge, norms, rules, and networks that facilitate collective experience) and satisfaction with the natural environment in the neighborhood.
- These results corroborate a large body of prior research indicating that wealth alone is not the only explanation for life satisfaction–our communities and environments matter as well.
- Given that more people now live in urban environments than at any point in human history, this speaks to the need for (re)developing cities to promote green spaces and social networks.
1Vemuri, A., et al. (2009) A Tale of Two Scales: Evaluating the Relationship Among Life Satisfaction, Social Capital, Income, and the Natural Environment at Individual and Neighborhood Levels in Metropolitan Baltimore. Environment and Behavior, (Online First edition).
2Bowdoin people can link to the article here.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinl8888/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Tags: Baltimore, happiness, urban
Posted in race and class, social science, urban | No Comments »
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