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The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
  • VIDEO: Karen O’Brien on Human Security and the Climate Change Agenda

    July 20, 2009 By Sean Peoples
    “Environmental change is not just environment; people are responding to lots of different shocks and stresses simultaneously that really act together to affect capacity to respond,” said Karen O’Brien professor in the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo and chair of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with O’Brien outside the GECHS conference in Oslo, Norway.

    For O’Brien, the GECHS project aims to create “a community of researchers who are showing it is about individuals and communities having the capacity to respond to threats… and pulling environmental change out of the box of just environment and bringing it into issues of development, poverty, vulnerability, etc.” By studying the full spectrum of impacts on individuals and communities, we may learn how to better craft integrated solutions on a macro scale.

    Moreover, O’Brien points out that linking research within the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities can lead to a greater understanding of the underlying issues driving challenges such as climate change. Her new book, Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance, presents the latest research on integrated adaptation to climate change and was co-edited with colleagues Neil Adger and Irene Lorenzoni.
    Topics: climate change, environmental security, video
    • http://www.blogger.com/profile/18337694112852162181 Geoff Dabelko

      I would also urge people to check out Karen's SAVI work, the Southern African Vulnerability Initiative that she has pursued over the years with Coleen Vogel of the University of Wits in South Africa. Although IPCC contributors themselves, they do not limit their notion of the sources of vulnerability to climate change. They explicitly recognize the importance of poverty, governance, health, food security etc in the multiple factors that go into making southern Africans vulnerable. This explicit attempt to account for complexity in research is a trademark of GECHS that runs through Karen's tenure as chair and back to Mike Brklacich and Steve Lonergan before her.

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