The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world exemplify the uneven impacts of climate change on populations, even within relatively small geographic regions. Differential human vulnerability to environmental hazards results from a range of social, economic, historical, and political factors, all of which operate at multiple scales. While adaptation to climate change has been the dominant focus of policy and research agendas, it is essential to ask as well why some communities and peoples are disproportionately exposed to and affected by climate threats. The cases and synthesis presented here are organized around four key themes (resource access, governance, culture, and knowledge), which we approach from four social science fields (cultural anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and sociology). Social scientific approaches to human vulnerability draw vital attention to the root causes of climate change threats and the reasons that people are forced to adapt to them. Because vulnerability is a multidimensional process rather than an unchanging state, a dynamic social approach to vulnerability is most likely to improve mitigation and adaptation planning efforts. This article is categorized under:Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values-Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation.

This article is concerned with caring for place, the interweaving of community, landscape, and culture. Culturally reflexive stewardship (crs) involves actions to sustain a way of life, motivated by a shared appreciation of place, landscape, and region, and expressed through practices that transmit cultural knowledge and affirm a social identity. The article first contrasts two resource regimes, one based on a logic of tradeoffs and markets, the other on a logic of stewardship. Second, it presents the key characteristics of crs, emphasizing the linkage of intellectual content (local knowledge) with an ethical imperative based in the symbolic qualities of place. Finally, the article explores the relationship of stewardship to social organization, and offers examples of crs in three modes, termed “living in place,” “conservation and recovery,” and “polarization and protest.”

This paper addresses the effect of international trade on cultural outcomes from both economic and anthropological perspectives. Definitions of culture are informed by anthropology and then incorporated into a standard economic trade models in two distinct ways. In the "cultural affinity from work" model, workers receive a non-pecuniary cultural benefit from work in a particular industry. In the "cultural externality" model, consumers of a product receive utility from other consumer's consumption of a domestic good. We show that resistance to change due to cultural concerns can reduce the national benefits from trade liberalization. Complete movements to free trade will have a positive national welfare impact in the cultural affinity case, whereas it may lower national welfare in the cultural externality case. We also show that a loss of cultural benefits is more likely to occur when culture is an externality.

US efforts to integrate social and biophysical sciences to address the issue of global change exist within a wider movement to understand global change as a societal challenge and to inform policy. Insights from the social sciences can help transform global change research into action.

As interest in the concept of ecosystem services (ES) has grown, so has its scope. This paper considers some limitations of the ES paradigm by examining one category of ES: cultural services, including the environmental basis for esthetic, spiritual, and recreational experiences, cultural heritage, sense of place, and ways of life. It examines whether cultural ES can be assessed in terms of purely individual benefits or if social/collective considerations must be included; and whether the concept of ‘services’ even provides an appropriate framework for understanding such values. To pursue these questions I consider the recent literature on the assessment and valuation of ‘cultural services’ and assess the adequacy of this perspective against several examples from American Indian communities of the Pacific Northwest. Three characteristics of these situations from Indian Country are problematic for an ES framework: the social construction of environmental experience, the symbolic character of environmental knowledge, and the multidimensionality of environmental value. On the basis of this analysis, I propose a model of culturally reflexive stewardship as potentially a more productive and theoretically consistent framework for characterizing such socially constructed environmental values and practices.

To enter widespread use, ecosystem service assessments need to be quantifiable, replicable, credible, flexible, and affordable. With recent growth in the field of ecosystem services, a variety of decision-support tools has emerged to support more systematic ecosystem services assessment. Despite the growing complexity of the tool landscape, thorough reviews of tools for identifying, assessing, modeling and in some cases monetarily valuing ecosystem services have generally been lacking. In this study, we describe 17 ecosystem services tools and rate their performance against eight evaluative criteria that gauge their readiness for widespread application in public- and private-sector decision making. We describe each of the tools′ intended uses, services modeled, analytical approaches, data requirements, and outputs, as well time requirements to run seven tools in a first comparative concurrent application of multiple tools to a common location – the San Pedro River watershed in southeast Arizona, USA, and northern Sonora, Mexico. Based on this work, we offer conclusions about these tools′ current 'readiness' for widespread application within both public- and private-sector decision making processes. Finally, we describe potential pathways forward to reduce the resource requirements for running ecosystem services models, which are essential to facilitate their more widespread use in environmental decision making.

Although the number of ecosystem service modeling tools has grown in recent years, quantitative comparative studies of these tools have been lacking. In this study, we applied two leading open-source, spatially explicit ecosystem services modeling tools – Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (ARIES) and Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) – to the San Pedro River watershed in southeast Arizona, USA, and northern Sonora, Mexico. We modeled locally important services that both modeling systems could address – carbon, water, and scenic viewsheds. We then applied managerially relevant scenarios for urban growth and mesquite management to quantify ecosystem service changes. InVEST and ARIES use different modeling approaches and ecosystem services metrics; for carbon, metrics were more similar and results were more easily comparable than for viewsheds or water. However, findings demonstrate similar gains and losses of ecosystem services and conclusions when comparing effects across our scenarios. Results were more closely aligned for landscape-scale urban-growth scenarios and more divergent for a site-scale mesquite-management scenario. Follow-up studies, including testing in different geographic contexts, can improve our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these and other ecosystem services modeling tools as they move closer to readiness for supporting day-to-day resource management.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The views expressed here are those of the author, and do not represent the policies of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

We incorporate culture into a standard trade model in two distinct ways. In the i°cultural affinity from worki± model, workers receive a non- pecuniary cultural benefit from work in a particular industry. In the i°cultural externalityi± model, consumers of a product receive utility from other consumeri¯s consumption of a domestic good. We show that resistance to change due to cultural concerns can reduce the national benefits from trade liberalization. Complete movements to free trade will have a positive national welfare impact in the cultural affinity case whereas it may lower national welfare in the cultural externality case. We also show that a loss of cultural benefits is more likely to occur in the externality model.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that `Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community'. As this suggests, the notion of cultural rights is both intuitively appealing and analytically vague. Assertions of cultural rights have gained prominence in both national and international policy contexts. This article considers some of the conceptual challenges, including a potential bias towards reification and traditionalism and the inherently contestable character of claims based on cultural rights. It also suggests a threshold test for identifying violations of cultural rights, and presents some alternatives to a rights-based framework for advancing cultural issues within public policy.

We anthropologists often feel like interlopers in the world of public policy. Too often we discover that the seats at the table have already been taken by economists, lawyers, and political scientists. Yet there are certain areas where for better or worse anthropologists are acknowledged as the policy "experts." One of these rare professional quasi-monopolies is termed (in America's bureaucratic fed-speak) "cultural resource management," a line of work that employs significant numbers of both archaeologists and ethnographers. Broadly, cultural resource management involves the protection of archeological sites on federal lands (such as timber lands controlled by the Forest Service, or grazing lands controlled by the Bureau of Land Management) or on projects requiring federal funding or permitting (such as dams or highways). But cultural resource management also involves the protection of places of "traditional cultural value." Primarily these are sites with traditional significance for American Indian communities.

The art of persuasion is integral to politics and policy. As an experienced political pundit once said, "It is not enough to know what we ought to say; we must also say it as we ought." (The statement is Aristotle's, from his Rhetoric III, 1.) One of the many reasons that we anthropologists are so often absent without leave in policy discussions is that we are not trained to communicate our knowledge clearly and effectively to non-anthropologists. If there is any stylistic rule taught in anthropology graduate programs, it is to write so as to be completely unintelligible to outsiders. (Perhaps this is appropriate, since tenure decisions are made on the same basis.)

In "The Making of Chumash Tradition" (Current Anthropology 38(5):761-94, December 1997) Brian Haley and Larry Wilcoxon offer a provocative argument regarding ethnic identity, environmental politics, and anthropological complicity in the construction of modern Chumash "traditionalism." Their argument centers on the ironic juxtaposition of Indians and anthropologists in the contemporary practice of cultural resource management in general, and traditional cultural property evaluation in particular. While their description of contemporary Chumash ethnic politics is complex, the centerpiece of their narrative concerns the cultural claims advanced in reaction to a 1978 proposal to construct a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal near Point Conception, in the vicinity of Santa Barbara, California.

In a past column I reported on the controversy surrounding the construction of the Pangue Hydroelectric Project by the Chilean power company ENDESA, an undertaking funded by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank Group (see Practicing Anthropology 19(4): 35-36, Fall 1997). That column focussed on the experience of anthropologist Theodore Downing, who was retained by the IFC to evaluate the Pehuen Foundation, an organization established to channel a portion of revenues from the Pangue Project for the long-term benefit of the indigenous Pehuenche communities affected by the dam.

My thoughts for this column are prompted by the economic drama unfolding in Southeast Asia and South Korea this winter: the bankruptcy of industrial combines, the collapse of banks, and the freefall decline of many Asian currencies. Frantic visits by modern-day shamans from the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury Department seeking to diagnose and cure this unfamiliar disease have thus far had very limited success. The financial debacle in Asia is more serious, and more interesting, because it confounds current economic expectations. Many of the macroeconomic heroes of nine months ago (South Korea and Indonesia, to name two) are today on the International Monetary Fund's critical list. As the economist Paul Krugman wrote in a recent article, It seems safe to say that nobody anticipated anything like the current crisis in Asia… What we have actually seen is something both more complex and more drastic [than anticipated]: collapses in domestic asset markets, widespread bank failures, bankruptcies on the part of many firms, and what looks likely to be a much more severe real downturn than even the most negativeminded anticipated. ("What Happened to Asia?" Online ms: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/DISINTER.html)