Climate and environmental change are increasingly accepted as a major issue facing societies, and a defining global challenge with significant potential to reshape future security and stability. As outlined in the DoD Climate Risk Analysis Report (2021) the associated risks include mass migration, altered patterns of infectious disease, water and food insecurity, degraded livelihood systems, political instability, supply chain disruptions, global conflict, and social fracturing, as well as adverse effects on an array of key economic sectors. The pace at which developed and emerging economies and nations can formulate a response to mitigate the complex social impact of climate change, including stress put on food, water, and shelter, is certain to be uneven and likely to require scientific, political, and ultimately pragmatic solutions that differ by location. This topic thus focuses on the development of approaches to describe and assess efficacy of climate change adaptation strategies, explores the relationship between social and technical “solutions,” and the opportunities and challenges associated with implementation and adoption. These approaches may be applied to characterize pertinent systems, component subsystems, and their interactions to determine whether we can gain sufficient insight to understand how systems adapt and which strategies may generalize. Areas of work within this topic may focus on a specific place or a particular adaptation strategy; comparison, when possible, is encouraged.
Food and food production systems, for example, are deeply embedded in social, material, economic, and cultural systems. Climate change is among the factors that shape ongoing stresses to such systems, including weather-related stresses on production and distribution systems, geopolitical dynamics affecting trade and conflict, demographic trends including population growth and urbanization within the context of disruptive technologies such as AI, automation, supply chain, and cyber-risk. As we consider the future of food system stability and sufficiency— or water, shelter, and corollary human needs—what social and technical challenges need to be met to facilitate stable and thriving communities?
While models increasingly offer more detailed projections of how populations might be impacted by climate change (although with assumptions that may not hold), this topic focuses on the social and sociotechnical challenges and opportunities of response. While societal cohesion, resilience, and responses to technological change are all relevant, the focus here is on adaptation which is likely to be culturally, socially, politically, and economically varied. There is particular interest in developing new ways of thinking and responding that appreciate innovations in depicting these systems and their dynamics, efficacy of different approaches to govern vital human systems such as food and clean water for collective benefit, delimiting types of responses to social and material change, interconnections between physical, biological, and social dimensions of adaptation to historical extremes, the importance of social needs such as the human need to belong, and the challenges and potential opportunities of centralized and/or distributed adaptation across different environments, communities, and scales.
Specific foci may include, but are not limited to:
• How do we describe and measure the efficacy of climate change adaptation strategies and outcomes in human dimensions? Do reflections of social, economic, and other manifestations of equity track qualitative and quantitative differences in impacts of climate change adaptation? Are there robust, practical methods to assess the value of ecosystem services, and their changes through time with sufficient granularity to understand intergroup dynamics across different levels of society? How will impacts of climate adaptation affect different aspects of national security?
• New understandings and approaches to governance managing the relevant Commons for desired collective outcomes in contexts of evolving needs, moral/ethical/societal norms, and population shifts
• What are the relationships between climate change, food and water access, shelter, and the performance of financial, political, religious, or other institutions, economic sectors, and national security? What methods can be applied to determine whether and how different types of social systems are affected by the social, economic, and political responses to environmental change?
• What are the implications in human dimensions of intentional and/or uncontrolled changes to meet and manage environmental constrains and resource availability?
- How does the nature of economic interdependence (or isolation) affect the management of environmental challenges across various geographic and political-economic scales?
• How might the advent of more distributed provisioning systems that use technological advancements to reshape the production of food, energy (heating, cooking) and/or building materials away from long, highly specialized supply chains dependent on annual production cycles affect livelihoods and labor, risk of food insecurity, economics and adaptation of economies, politics, ideologies, and geopolitics, and of formal and informal social structures within and between communities? If there are multiple ways such systems could facilitate food sovereignty, are there mechanisms by which to predict which way will be most successful in a given context(s)?
• How can emerging technologies help to mitigate the adverse impacts, threats, and risks due to climate change, creating unexpected benefits (e.g. technological breakthroughs in distributed production, increased social coherence through better risk governance, etc.), and what social challenges and opportunities do those technologies present? How does this vary across different societies or societal segments? How do risks in adopting unfamiliar technologies influence the provision of these technologies?
• How can traditional and indigenous approaches to climate variability, food, water, and shelter augment local adaptations of sociotechnical approaches to changing stresses on one’s lived environment?