Event Description
There is an urgent need for more sustainable and resilient systems of natural resource management as anthropogenic climate change pushes communities across the world into greater precarity. However, the scientific tools used for understanding this challenge tend to reinforce global Northern assumptions about the climate as a long-term steady state with slow-moving consequences, as evinced by the focus on end-of-century climate change projections in official planning. In reality, most relevant adaptation decisions happen on a human timescale in response to year-to-year climate variability. This has long been apparent to communities in arid and sub-tropical environments, for whom environmental unpredictability and complex natural resource dynamics are facts of life. Better understanding of how these climate “riskscapes” are lived and understood by impacted communities, current and historical, can unlock crucial insights for the study and practice of climate resilience everywhere.
The Climate Riskscapes Conference will convene an interdisciplinary group of humanities, natural science, and social science scholars to discuss sustainable techniques and technological systems developed and utilized locally and regionally over millennia in precarious environments. Participants will be asked to share their unique perspectives on this topic and identify points for interdisciplinary collaboration and new research initiatives.
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Center for Science and Society. Sponsored by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University and the Mellon Foundation.
The Center for Science and Society makes every reasonable effort to accommodate individuals with disabilities. If you require disability accommodations to attend a Center for Science and Society event, please contact us at [email protected] or (212) 854-0666 at least 10 days in advance of the event. For more information, please visit the campus accessibility webpage.
