What is HDGC?

Mission: To promote the varied interests of geographers who are united by research, teaching, and service that involves the human dimensions of processes in coupled human-environment systems at local to global scales.

1992 National Research Council (NRC) Report on Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change

The 1992 NRC Report was a comprehensive review of the human dimensions of global environmental change. This report addressed the need for social and natural scientists to work together to understand the causes and consequences of global change. In addition to reviewing the state of HDGEC knowledge, the book identified immediate needs for knowledge and presented a strategic plan for the next 10 years.

The report focused on the drivers and responses to GEC, while identifying three key axes for for advancing knowledge. There are 3 main axes of needs for advancing knowledge:

1. Problems of theory and methods

Understanding human interactions with global environmental change poses problems of both theory and method, necessitating interdisciplinary research. Most social scientific theory is not suited for the spatial and temporal scale of of global change issues. "Social science will need to develop new theoretical tools for analyzing such issues as major national and international changes in political-economic structure, the sources of variation and change in slowly changing aspects of human systems, the long-term impacts of short-term social changes, relationships between global social changes and the global environment, and links between human-environment relationships at different levels of spatial aggregation" (p.6). A pluralistic approach to methods is needed to develop greater understanding of underlying processes in order to support modeling efforts. Post hoc analysis should play a central role in developing this understanding.

2. Data needs

HDGEC research necessitates improved availability of and access to data, improved quality control of data, and collection of critical new data.

Large archives of data are available, but efforts are needed to make data more easily accessible through the creation of a centralized network and archival facility to house data. Data costs should be brought to near marginal costs of production. The quality of these data must also be monitored and assessed. Further research is needed on the quality of available data sets, and to improve methods of data collection. moving forward, there is a need to inventory existing data in order to identify missing data, and data on variables for which current measures are inadequate.

3. Human resources and organizational requirements

The interdisciplinary nature of global change research necessitates improvements in institutional infrastructure, training, and restructuring of the federal research effort. Programs of HDGEC research need to develop long-term institutional identities, particularly at universities and national research centers. Funders should support the development of these agencies, and also support the training of a new generation of interdisciplinary researchers. The current structure of federal agencies presents a barrier to funding and developing this interdisciplinary agenda. There continues to be a major disconnect between the programs that fund global change research and the agencies with strong capabilities in social science, with the exception of the NSF.

From this report, the authors provided six recommendations for a national research program:

1. The National Science Foundation should increase substantially its support for investigator-initiated or unsolicited research on the human dimensions of global change. This program should include a category of small grants subject to a simplified review procedure.

2. The National Science Foundation, other appropriate federal agencies, and private funding sources should establish programs of targeted or focused research on the human dimensions of global change.

3. The federal government should establish an ongoing program to ensure that appropriate data sets for research on the human dimensions of global change are routinely acquired, properly prepared for use, and made available to researchers on simple and affordable terms.

4. The federal government, together with private funding sources, should establish a national fellowship program. Through it, social and natural scientists prepared to make a long-term commitment to the study of the human dimensions of global environmental change could spend up to two years interacting intensively with scientists from other disciplines, especially scientists from across the social science-natural science divide.

5. The federal government should join with private funding sources to establish about five national centers for research on the human dimensions of global change and to make a commitment to funding these centers on a long-term basis.

6. The federal government should increase funding for research on the human dimensions of global change over a period of several years to a level of $45-50 million.

The full 1992 Report can be found here:

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=1792&page=R1

See pages 1 to 16 for a concise summary of the entire report.

1999 NRC Report on the U.S. Global Change Research Program

The 1999 NRC report sought to evaluate 10 years of reasearch by the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The report argued for a clear scientific strategy that emphasized unanswered scientific questions through support for observational, data management and analysis activities.

Chapter 7 of the report specifically addressed the human dimensions of global environmental change and presented the following nine research imperatives (p. 337).

• Understanding the social determinants of environmentally significant consumption.

Research should focus on the most environmentally significant consumption types, changes in consumption patterns as a function of economic growth and development, materials transformations, and the potential for related policy changes. Consumption is a key variable driving trends and patterns in the human impact on atmospheric composition, land use, and biogeochemical cycles.

• Understanding the sources and processes of technological change.

Research must address the causes of “autonomous” decreases in energy intensity, determinants of the adoption of environmental technologies, and effects of alternative policies on rates of innovation and the role of technology in causing or mitigating global changes.

• Making climate change assessments and predictions regionally relevant.

Research must develop indicators for vulnerability, project future vulnerability to climatic events, link climate change with social and economic changes in projections of overall regional impacts and their distribution, and improve communication and warning systems, especially in view of recent developments in forecasting.

• Assessing social and environmental surprises.

The historical record of social and environmental surprises must be explored to clarify the consequences of major surprises, identify human activities that alter their likelihood, and better understand how communication and hazard management systems can help in responding to surprises.

• Understanding institutions for managing global change.

Research should clarify the conditions favoring institutional success or failure in resource management; the links among international, national, and local institutions; and the potential of various policy instruments, including market-based instruments and property rights institutions, for altering the trajectories of anthropogenic global changes.

• Understanding land use/land cover dynamics and human migration.

This research should examine and compare case studies of land use and land cover change; develop a typology that links social and economic driving forces to land cover dynamics; and model land use changes at regional and global scales, particularly as they affect ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles and the human consequences of environmental change.

• Improving methods for decision making about global change.

Research should improve ways of estimating nonmarket values of environmental resources, incorporating these values into national accounts, representing uncertainty to decision makers, and structuring decision-making procedures and techniques of scientific analysis so as to bring formal analyses together with judgments and thus better meet the needs of decision-making participants.

• Improving the integration of human dimensions research with other global change research.

Human dimensions research supports each of the other fields of scientific research on global change and also addresses key crosscutting issues. It requires focused and coordinated support that draws on the strengths of both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches and that takes advantage of value added by international collaborations.

• Improving geographic links to existing social, economic, and health data.

Human dimensions data systems benefit from adding geographic information to ongoing social data collection efforts, with appropriate safeguards for confidentiality. The effectiveness of these data systems depends on adequate and stable support. The time is ripe for a careful review of the observational needs for human dimensions research, with careful attention to the ability to link to other observational systems.