Environmental and Climate Impacts on National Security: A Coupled Human-Environment System Perspective

环境退化可能导致持续的自然和人道主义灾难，当社会需求超过地方政府的应对能力时，可能会造成政治不稳定。当地土地利用变化对抗旱能力和对外部粮食依赖的影响还不是很清楚。这项工作将把环境测量和特征、数值气候模式和预测统计模式与从大型历史数据集确定的趋势结合起来，以便为规划和理解基于环境的不稳定的影响提供有价值的信息和分析。拟议的方法将允许对这种影响进行评估，并提供信息，以便采取缓解措施。减轻区域影响比减轻全球气候变化影响更容易处理，可以通过外部援助来实现。重点是撒哈拉以南非洲地区，在干旱和半干旱地区，土地利用变化造成的降雨减少可能对农业产生重大影响。所提议的方法的独特之处在于，它结合了一种方法，在一个相对局部的地区审查人口增长、土地利用变化和气候反馈对粮食安全的影响。通过将当前环境测量与当前和历史数据以及一套经过验证的建模方法相结合，该项目将增强集成和解释这些不同信息源的能力。研究人员将为研究生和本科生的研究工作提供整合。

Environmental degradation can lead to sustained natural and humanitarian disasters, which may foster political instability when societal demands exceed the capacity of local governments to cope. The influence of local land use changes on resiliency to droughts and on external food dependency is not very well understood. The effort will integrate environmental measurements and signatures, numerical climate models, and predictive statistical models with trends identified from large historical data sets, in order to provide valuable information and analyses for use in planning and understanding the impact of environment-based instabilities. The proposed methodology will allow evaluation of such effects and provide information to allow for mitigation. Mitigation of regional impacts is more tractable than global climate change impacts and could be effected through external aid. The focus is on regions of sub-Saharan Africa, where in the arid and semi-arid regions, the reduction in rainfall caused by land use change is likely to have significant implications for agriculture. The uniqueness of the proposed methodology is the coupled approach of examining the impact of population growth, land use change and climate feedback to food security in a relatively local area. By integrating current environmental measurements with current and historical data and a suite of proven modeling approaches, the project will enhance the ability to integrate and interpret these disparate information sources. The researchers will provide for the integration of students into research efforts at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.