Projects
Vulnerability of Food Security and Energy Infrastructures to Climate Change and Terrorism
Most of the connections between climate change impacts and human security issues (including conflict) have been made in the form of narratives. For example, "water wars" stories have connected projected water scarcity with armed conflict, and "environmental refugee" stories have connected climate change conditions with privations that drive people from their homes and perhaps across international borders, with resultant massive social problems. This project will develop a new modeling approach that integrates the broad domains that are crucial to the understanding of global issues involved in climate change and human security.
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A model design that includes both data and expert knowledge sources, represents the interactions of ecological and social factors, and allows the user to perform a wide variety of analyses also will provide the interdisciplinary space for knowledge integration among development team members. Ecological, energy/economics, and social factors will be represented at appropriate spatial and temporal scales in order to gain a holistic understanding of the technosocial components and their connections to climate change and security.
This project builds on the capabilities of three models, all extensively developed and used at the Joint Global Change Research Institute: the MiniCAM, EPIC (Environmental Policy Integrated Model), and VRIM (Vulnerability-Resilience Indicators Model).
The new integrated technosocial model results—developed first for India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—may provide additional detail for or debunk the connecting narratives between climate change and security. The integration of various knowledge domains provides new insights into the relationship between resilience to climate change and maintenance (or creation) of human security.