Collaborative Research: Coupling and Cohesion as Factors Affecting Vulnerability to Abrupt Climate Change

Dr. Benjamin Vining, of the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, along with collaborators from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, the University of Florida-Gainesville, and in Peru, will examine how the organization of different agricultural production systems relates to climate change vulnerabilities. Climate change is increasingly a public and policy concern.

This research will focus on understanding how different agricultural strategies were used as el Nino disasters occurred in the past with changing frequency and strength. Understanding how agriculturalists switched between productive strategies will improve long-term adaptations to climate change, provide theoretical and applied models for how to address climate change in future planning and development, and promote local adaptive capacities.

Using agriculture as a set of case studies, these models can be generalized to other forms of economic networks to understand how various strategies can promote resilience. This project will establish new multidisciplinary approaches to tackle such complex problems as climate change adaptation, and train graduate students from the partner institutions and countries in international collaborations.

Dr. Vining and his team will examine how prehispanic agriculturalists developed and switched between various productive strategies as the el Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) changed in frequency and severity. The study region, north coastal Peru, hosted a series of civilizations between approximately 2000 BC - 1450 AD, including the Moche, Lambayeque, and Chimu societies.

However, the region is also particularly vulnerable to el Nino induced disasters, such as occurred recently in 2016-2017. Initial archaeological work in this region indicates that prehispanic agriculture was based on a suite of strategies. The complex economies that supported prehispanic societies were based on in part on switching amongst agricultural strategies as climatic contexts shifted.

The researchers come from the fields of archaeology, paleolimnology and palaeoclimate, and ecological modeling. A principal objective will be to combine high-precision dating of agricultural systems with paleoclimate conditions reconstructed from lake cores. The researchers will use this multidisplinary methodological background to improve historic reconstructions of past ENSO variations, record archaeological examples of agricultural technologies in their environmental context, and reconstruct how different strategies were employed as ENSO effected climate.

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.