Workshop for a Social Science Research Program to Complementthe International Geosphere-Biosphere Program on Global Change

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In 1986, the twenty-first General Assembly of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) established the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme: A Study of Global Change. Over the next ten years, the IGBP is charged with describing and understanding the interactive physical, chemical, and biological processes that regulate the total Earth system, the unique environment that it provides for life, the changes that are occuring in this system, and the manner in which they are influenced by human actions. For a number of reasons, the IGBP presently includes very little social science research that would aid in understanding human activities that affect the development of global models. Consequently, several groups, including the ISSC, have taken steps to launch a social science research program to complement IGBP. They have planned a major international symposium which will take place in Tokyo in 1988 to develop a preliminary plan for an international social science research program that will complement the IGBP. This small grant will underwrite a planning workshop so that U.S. social scientists can meet to help shape the international social science research program that will complement the IGBP. The workshop participants will make recommendations to the steering group that will be responsible for organizing the Tokyo symposium about the agenda, organization, and structuring of the symposium. Equally as important, they will make recommendations about the development of a research program that U.S. social scientists would undertake as the U.S. national component of the international program. Social scientists from many disciplines and specialties within disciplines will participate in the workshop which will be held at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan in the Fall of l987. The models and agendas that will be developed at this workshop will have great scientific value both for the aims of the IGBP and for important future directions of social science. By nature of the structure of the social sciences, theoretical and empirical work has not by and large focused on the interaction between human activities and natural changes in the world environment. Similarly, the natural sciences have not come to terms with the interplay of natural events and social, economic, cultural, political, and legal factors. This workshop will be an important first step toward the long-term goal of relating the study of human activities and how they change to global models of natural phenomena.