Pathways of Understanding

Executive Summary

Earth is a place of change, first and continually by natural forces, and increasingly by a myriad of human activities. Humans are naturally inclined to organize into social groups, and our ability to question, explore and learn, has caused and continues to cause much of the environmental change we experience today. Critical global change issues including loss of biodiversity, climate change and ozone depletion will all likely remain center stage as we enter the 21st century. A growing realization surrounding research into these and other areas is how human activities combine with naturally occurring activities to contribute to global change. This new facet of global change research is called the human dimensions of global change.

This document explores how humans, interacting within social systems, affect and are affected by global change. The causes and consequences of human activities need to be factored into the discussions, research, predictions, policies and actions surrounding global change. When the links between the natural and human domains are identified and quantified, we will begin to fully understand the direction of global change. Achieving this goal requires that social and natural scientists work together to identify and understand global change and to recommend courses of action to ensure the long-term well- being of Earth and all its inhabitants.

Recognizing the impact human activities have on global change and responding to the need to document the interactions among human activities, the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) commissioned a group of 12 social scientists to develop a model illustrating the key human systems that contribute to global change. This model, called the Social Process Diagram, will help natural and social scientists, educators, resource managers and policy makers envision and analyze how human systems interact to affect global change.

The Social Process Diagram is, in part, an expansion of several preceding global change research efforts. In the mid-1980s, a group of natural scientists constructed a diagram picturing the interactions among natural processes that influence global change. This diagram has become widely known as the Bretherton Diagram. While ÒHuman ActivitiesÓ are noted on the Bretherton Diagram, the relationships among these activities were not developed. With the Social Process Diagram, we have begun to analyze human interactions as thoroughly as the interactions among the natural sciences.

The Social Process Diagram consists of seven driving forces that correlate with the social science disciplines of anthropology and archaeology, demography, political science, and economics. These seven driving forces constitute the Diagram's structural framework:

Fund of Knowledge and Experience. This refers to the formal and informal understanding people have of their natural and social environments, and to the technology that their culture defines as relevant.

Preferences and Expectations. From the Fund of Knowledge people define their preferences and expectations, which reflect the culturally defined constraints and opportunities that confront individual actions.

Factors of Production and Technology, including Resources, Labor, Land, Capital, Raw Material and Energy. The resources and technology people use to produce goods and services constitute this category. This category helps us trace what elements enter the system, how they are modified and what emerges at the end of the process.

Population and Social Structure. The worldÕs growing population is perhaps one of the most important factors of global environmental change. Population helps determine the demands placed on resources and thus whether or not a region will sufficiently fulfill these demands. Population can be defined statically (size, distribution, and the social categories); in terms of social structure (ethnicity, class, caste or clan); or dynamically (marriage, birth and death rates).

Economic Systems. Economic systems determine how people produce and consume goods and how wealth is distributed and evolves.

Political Systems and Institutions. Institutions and organizations ranging from governments to the family unit influence policy formation and the way society is organized.

Global Scale Environmental Processes. Physical, chemical, geological and biological processes that are outside the human domain, but affect and are influenced by human activities, fall into this category. This category represents the link from the Social Process Diagram to the Bretherton Diagram.

Because output from one driving force is the input into another, none of these categories can be evaluated in isolation. Driving forces are linked by processes in which elements from one domain influence the evolution of elements within another. By analyzing the processes operating to create a specific global change scenario, the Diagram becomes a dynamic analytical tool. The Diagram can help reveal the interactions among the relevant categories. Furthermore, the Diagram accounts for the fact that human phenomena occur within a certain geographic location and over a certain time period. Adding the elements of space (the region in which a change is taking place) and time (how quickly a process is occurring) to an issue under investigation extends the value of the Diagram and helps pinpoint our understanding of the issue.

To demonstrate potential ways the Diagram can be used, this document includes three hypothetical scenarios of global change issues: energy and the environment, global warming and sea level rise, and the environmental impact of population migration. These scenarios demonstrate the DiagramÕs usefulness for visualizing the disciplines and specific phenomena that might be studied to evaluate a particular global change issue. Each scenario also shows that interesting and perhaps unanticipated research questions may emerge as links are explored between categories on the Diagram.

The effort to develop and publish the Social Process Diagram is a critical step in understanding the human dimensions of global change. The next step to better understanding environmental change is to join the Bretherton Diagram with the Social Process Diagram into a more complete picture of global change. With this road map, scientists, policy makers, resource managers and other will have a tool to comprehend both Earth system science and how the complex range of connections between the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere and hydrosphere form the dynamic Earth system.

The Social Process Diagram will serve as a cornerstone for furthering existing research efforts and will hopefully initiate new efforts. These research directions are consistent with the agendas proposed by other national and international groups, including the United States Global Change Research Program, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the National Research Council.

This publication also emphasizes a new role for social scientists within global change research. Not only is it important for professionals within the natural and social sciences to study global change issues individually, but we also need to work together and share data to study these issues as related parts of the global system. An overview of the Working GroupÕs vision of potential research tracts is also presented.