Living With the Dangers of Sudden Environmental Change

这一奖项将使一项开创性文本产生更广泛的影响，该文本是最近一次由国家科学基金会支持的2009年10月专家会议的主要成果。这本书的目的是提供一个新的概念性理解，了解人类社区如何生活在突然的环境变化的危险中。研究小组将利用其跨学科方法提供的深度时间视角，为人类对环境危害和影响的体验提供丰富的时间背景。研究团队设想，这本书将作为一本关于这些问题的开创性书籍，用于各种强调跨学科研究的大学课程。这本书的方法是提供八个独立的案例研究，每个案例研究过去的人类社区如何面对环境变化的影响。书中讲述了关于韧性和脆弱性的不同故事，随着该书的发展，成功管理灾害的关键教训浮出水面。在这些案例研究之后，将有两个精辟的概述章节，阐述政策影响，并将直接为政府和非政府援助机构的灾害管理战略提供信息。这本书的大多数专家撰稿人都在提出的许多问题与现代社区直接相关的领域工作。通过现有的合作伙伴关系，研究小组将把这本书分发给土著领导人和当地社区活动家，以便在科学社区和土著社区之间进行直接对话。NSF支持这本书的传播，将使受到突然环境变化威胁的人能够参与正在进行的辩论，同时也让规划未来缓解战略的人从过去吸取非常重要的教训。此外，出版费用的补贴将使学生能够轻松地阅读这本书。

This award will enable the broader impacts of a seminal text that is the main output of a recent NSF-supported meeting of experts in October 2009. The objective of this book is to provide a new conceptual understanding of how human communities live with the dangers of sudden environmental change. The research team will utilize the deep time perspectives provided by their interdisciplinary approaches to provide a rich temporal context to the human experience of environmental hazards and impacts. The research team envisions the book as a seminal volume on these issues for use in a variety of college courses that stress interdisciplinary studies. The approach of the book is to provide eight separate case studies, each examining how one past human community has faced the impacts of environmental change. Different stories of resilience and vulnerability are told and as the book develops, key lessons for successful disaster management emerge. These case studies will be followed by two incisive overview chapters that develop policy implications and will directly inform disaster management strategies for Government and Non-Governmental Aid Agencies. The majority of specialist contributors to this book work in areas where many of the issues raised are directly relevant for modern day communities. Through existing collaborative partnerships the research team will distribute the book to indigenous leaders and local community activists so that there is a direct dialogue between the scientific and indigenous communities. NSF support to enable this dissemination of the book will enable people who are threatened by sudden environmental change to engage in ongoing debates while also engaging the people who plan future mitigation strategies to learn very important lessons from the past. In addition, the subvention of publication costs will allow the book to be accessible in soft back to students.