FY 1995 Awards for Research Teams and Research Centers

9521910 Clark, William Harvard University

Global Environmental Assessment Team

As part of an NSF Consortium for Research on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, this award provides support for a collaborative study of global environmental assessment. This team effort is based at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government but involves scholars from Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, and Duke Universities, and from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The goal of this project is to improve society's ability to integrate science-based assessments in the progressive development, implementation, and evaluation of responses to large-scale, long-term problems of global environmental change. The team conducts empirical and conceptual research, drawing on a variety of disciplinary perspectives, to advance understanding of how assessment is done, how it interacts with policy-making, politics, and negotiations, and how assessment practice could more usefully contribute to effective social management of global environmental change. The team seeks to develop more realistic models of relationships among assessment, policy making and management of global change, avoiding conventional views of assessment-policy relationships as linear and static, and uses these models to critique and improve current practice. Each year, the team recruits an international group of pre- and post-doctoral fellows, with backgrounds in both social and natural sciences. Fellows spend a year engaged in research on environmental assessment and policy, principally in residence at Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs but with significant periods at the other member institutions. The team adopts one major focus each year -- either assessment experience on a particular global environmental issue, or a particular conceptual approach to the study and criticism of assessment. A one-week summer institute each year brings together all faculty and fellows for an intensive period of collaborative work drawing together the year's work, and producing a monograph for publication.

Back to top

9521952 Knight, Gregory Pennsylvania State University

Center for Integrated Regional Assessment

As part of an NSF Consortium for Research on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, this award provides support for the Methods for Integrated Regional Assessment Project (MIRA). This project, developed by the interdisciplinary Human Dimensions Program of Penn State's Earth System Science Center (ESSC) in collaboration with researchers from the University of Arizona, focuses on the development of innovative methods for assessing the regional consequences of global change. MIRA will develop methods for linking global processes of climate and economic change to impacts, individual perceptions and behavior, and institutional and economic responses at the local or regional scale. These methods include climate downscaling, multilevel and regional modeling, vulnerability assessment, and surveys of individual and firm perceptions, valuation, and response to environmental change and policy. In addition, NSF support will provide a modest level of long-term institutional capability for the Human Dimensions Program within Penn State's Earth Systems Science Center.

Back to top

9521918 Moran, Emilio Indiana University

Ostrom, Elinor

A Proposal to Support A Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change

As part of an NSF Consortium for Research on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, this award establishes a Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) at Indiana University. CIPEC's primary focus is on a systematic, long-term study of deforestation and afforestation processes as mediated by institutions. Three broad questions serve as central organizing themes for research: (1) How is human behavior at household and community levels linked to regional and global change phenomena? (2) How can macro-scale physical processes observed and modeled at a global level be linked to meso and micro human organizational and decision-making processes? (3) How do institutional arrangements influence the direction and size of the impact of human driving forces, such as population and transportation networks, on forest ecosystems and global change? These broad, overarching questions are addressed by specific projects that combine the efforts of social scientists, ecologists, and physical scientists working together on sustained, over-time research conducted in carefully selected sites using the best methods from the physical, biological, and the social sciences. The Center draws on expertise from four existing Indiana University centers: The Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT), the Workshop in Political Theory and Analysis, the Midwestern Regional Center of the National Institute for Global Environmental Change (NIGEC), and the Population Institute for Research and Training (PIRT). CIPEC also addresses the national need of training doctoral-level environmental social scientists in rigorous disciplinary methods and the development of interdisciplinary skills. The Center has an international commitment to the training of mid-career scholars and professionals from a number of countries in recognition of the global nature of environmental change. CIPEC will produce new discoveries and new knowledge that will both expand our understanding of the human dimensions of global change and influence the direction of research in the larger HDGC community. In addition, CIPEC will foster both interdisciplinary research and multidisciplinary training in the human dimensions of global change.

Link to CIPEC homepage http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/cipec/cipec.html

Back to top

9521914 Morgan, Granger Carnegie Mellon University

Dowlatabadi, Hadi

Carnegie Mellon Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change

As part of an NSF Consortium for Research on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, this award supports the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change. The Center activities, coordinated through Carnegie-Mellon University, will be conducted by more than thirty researchers from fourteen institutions located in seven countries around the world. The mandate of this Center is the systematic integration of global change research. Such a systematic integration can reveal new insights from the existing body of knowledge, help identify the neglected issues, and promote the necessary research. While integrated analysis will form the core of the Center's efforts, this analysis will be supported with basic and applied research on selected issues of substance, theory, and methods. This work will involve: Descriptive and behavioral studies which aim to understand how humans perceive and behave in their environment, and normative and analytical studies which aim to characterize forces of change in the environment and evaluate alternative policy options. In addition to research, the Center will be active in facilitating better communication between the public, students, decision-makers, and researchers. In summary, the Center will: 1)Provide a single research framework within which to analyze and compare a variety of different aspects of global change; 2) Be a dynamic source of new research ideas and a stimulus for basic research activity on the human dimensions of global change; 3) Advance the state of the art of integrated research and modeling; 4) Facilitate greater collaboration between social and natural scientists on a cross-institutional and cross-national basis in the context of a shared analytical environment; 5) Provide an important vehicle for discourse on global change issues between researchers, the public, and key decision makers around the world; and 6) Provide innovative educational services to citizen groups, schools, universities, and decision-makers.

External Link to CMU Center for Integrated Study of Human Dimensions of Global Change Homepage

Back to top

***

9521891 Nordhaus, William NBER

NBER/Yale Center for Global Change

The NBER/Yale Center for Global Change is designed to further the study of problems of the environment with particular attention to the international dimension, to linking economics and other social sciences, and to bringing together American and foreign researchers in the social sciences working on human dimensions of global change. The project will encourage the creation of an `invisible college` which encompasses two major elements: (1) it will bring together active researchers from U.S. research organizations under the umbrella of a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) project; and (2) it will generate substantial domestic and international cooperative research through conferences and workshops. These meetings will bring together U.S. and foreign researchers under the auspices of Yale University, the NBER, and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria. The NBER has long served the role of encouraging collaborative research among different institutions. This function is particularly important for research in the human dimensions of global change because of its broad scale, international scope, and interdisciplinary nature.

Back to top

9513406 Smith, Vernon University of Arizona

Hoffman, Elizabeth

Rassenti, Stephen

Environmental Change and Adaptive Resource Markets: Computer-Assisted Markets for Water Allocation

The allocation of water is a complex system, involving externalities, public goods, and shared production facilities. Such complex systems have employed central authorities to solve coordination problems and dictate solutions to the allocation problems. In a world of rapid technological and environmental change, government solutions may move too slowly to allow a society to adapt efficiently. Smart, computer-assisted markets provide the promise of developing flexible decentralized solutions to complex problems. Smart markets allow private market allocations to instantaneously account for coordination problems. They also can incorporate environmental or distributional constraints; thus, individual decision makers can respond to a changing environment, allowing society as a whole to adapt rapidly. This research develops, tests, and implements a generic smart market for water allocation which will be initialized for application in California. The research provides an empirical testbed for a smart market for water allocation in any arid land: other applications will simply involve a different network configuration and supply sources whose parameters can be used to initialize the appropriate nodal trading system.

Back to top
Back to HDGC Awards Lists