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，当社会需求超出地方政府的科普能力时，这可能会加剧政治不稳定。 当地土地使用的变化对抵御干旱的能力和对外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、数值气候模型和预测统计模型与从大型历史数据集确定的趋势结合起来，以便提供有价值的信息和分析，用于规划和了解环境不稳定的影响。拟议的方法将允许对这种影响进行评估，并提供信息，以便进行缓解。减轻区域影响比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，在那里的干旱和半干旱地区，土地使用变化造成的降雨量减少可能对农业产生重大影响。拟议方法的独特之处在于采用了一种综合办法，在一个相对局部的地区审查人口增长、土地使用变化和气候反馈对粮食安全的影响。 通过将当前的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，该项目将提高整合和解释这些不同信息源的能力。 研究人员将为学生提供研究生和本科生两个层次的研究工作的整合。

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.