Collaborative Research: Mapping the materiality of past human responses to climate change

随着气候变化的加剧，研究人类对气候扰动的适应和反应变得至关重要。海平面上升，海洋变暖和其他气候变化导致的变化使沿海社区的数百万人处于气候危机的前线。这些社区必须适应日益严重的粮食、能源、基础设施和水不安全状况。关于过去变化的知识以及如何有效应对干扰的知识是一种代代相传的社会记忆。这种社会记忆的丧失可能会严重限制人们适应不断变化的环境的能力。该项目研究了社会记忆对人类在十年到千年时间尺度上对气候变化反应的影响。本研究阐明了知识流失对人类适应能力的影响。研究结果可以为优先保护代际知识的政策提供信息，以减轻气候变化对人类社会的负面影响。该项目支持来自服务不足社区的多名研究生和早期职业学者的培训，并促进来自科学代表性不足群体的两名主要研究人员的职业生涯。该项目是与利益攸关方沿海社区合作开展的。该项目假设，社会记忆通过增加社区对各种生计战略的了解，帮助社区适应气候变化，从而使人们能够试验和确定最有效的战略。在与利益相关者社区合作研究的三个季节中收集和分析的考古，民族历史和古气候数据提供了过去气候事件和人类反应的记录。这些记录的结合使研究人员能够确定社会记忆对过去应对气候变化的影响，并模拟代际知识的丧失将如何影响社区适应未来变化的能力。这项工作阐明了信息流在人类适应中的作用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

As climate change intensifies, the study of human adaptation and response to climate disturbances has become critical. Sea level rise, warming oceans, and other climate-driven changes place millions of people in coastal communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. These communities must adapt to increasing food, energy, infrastructure, and water insecurity. Knowledge of past change and how to respond effectively to disturbance is a form of social memory passed down through generations. The loss of this social memory may severely limit people’s capacity to adapt to changing conditions. This project investigates the influence of social memory on human responses to climate change at decadal to millennial time scales. This research clarifies the impacts of knowledge loss on human adaptive capacity. The results can inform policies that prioritize the preservation of intergenerational knowledge to mitigate the negative effects of climate change on human societies. This project supports the training of multiple graduate students and early career scholars from underserved communities and advances the careers of two principal investigators from underrepresented groups in science. The project is conducted in collaboration with stakeholder coastal communities. This project hypothesizes that social memory helps communities adapt to climate change by increasing community knowledge about diverse livelihood strategies, thus enabling people to experiment and identify the strategies that work best. Archaeological, ethnohistorical, and paleoclimate data collected and analyzed during three seasons of collaborative research with stakeholder communities provide a record of past climate events and human responses. The combination of these records allows researchers to identify the impact of social memory on past responses to climate change and model how the loss of intergenerational knowledge will impact communities’ capacity to adapt to future change. This work clarifies the role of information flows in human adaptation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.