Doctoral Dissertation Research: Variation in Socio-Environmental System Response to Glacial Recession

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Rapid glacier recession presents a unique opportunity to explore how environmental forces shape human actions while being shaped by them in return. While research on increasing environmental variability justifiably continues to focus on understanding the physical characteristics of glacier retreat, not enough research addresses the impacts of glacial retreat on evolving, socially created landscapes built around glaciers.

As a result, resiliency and climate adaptation policies may fail because they ignore the complex social relationships and historical particularities that shaped societies in glacial environments to begin with and pay insufficient attention to how human relationships with both other humans and their environment evolve as glaciers melt. This doctoral dissertation research project asks how human and human-environmental relations influence the formation of transforming landscapes and livelihoods.

In addition to providing funding for the training of a graduate student in anthropology in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, the project results will be disseminated to organizational stakeholders that can optimize climate adaptation policies. This project also broadens the participation of groups underrepresented in science.

This comparative research project, conducted in two melting glacial valleys, examines how unevenly situated stakeholders adapt to, circumvent or exploit glacial melt. Pilot research revealed a glacial valley where stakeholders, including indigenous and other local communities, scientists, miners and policymakers, were more concerned with claiming rights to newly accessible land and resources than with impending water scarcity.

This points to a potential gap between climate adaptation policies, focused on vulnerability, and actual lived experiences of environmental change. Via in-depth and semi-structured interviews and mobile observational elicitation techniques, this project explores variation in the ways which climate change impacts stakeholders’ present and immediate future, providing insights into the potential range of human responses to glacial melt at a global level.

Results from the research improve scientific understanding of the transformation of human-environmental systems in response to climate change.

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.