Don Nelson

University of Georgia | UGA · Department of Anthropology

The relationship between poverty and climate change vulnerability is complex and though not commensurate, the distinctions between the two are often blurred. There is widespread recognition of the need to better understand poverty-vulnerability dynamics in order to improve risk management and poverty reduction investments. This is challenging due t...

To respond to climate impact, poor agricultural households in less developed regions rely on different types of assets that define their overall adaptive capacity (AC). However not all assets build capacity equally. In this study we argue that building AC requires a combination of interventions that address not only climate-related risks (specific...

Processes of land degradation and regeneration display fine scale heterogeneity often intimately linked with land use. Yet, examinations of the relationships between land use and land degradation often lack the resolution necessary to understand how local institutions differentially modulate feedback between individual farmers and the spatially het...

Civil infrastructure will be essential to face the interlinked existential threats of climate change and rising resource demands while ensuring a livable Anthropocene for all. However, conventional infrastructure planning largely neglects the contributions and maintenance of Earth’s ecological life support systems, which provide irreplaceable servi...

Resumo Este artigo trata do tema da crise ambiental que nos ensina sobre reconhecer a devastação ocasionada pelos processos coloniais e o esforço global por uma emancipação ambiental. Abordamos o conceito de crise ambiental no âmbito do campo de conhecimento antropológico. Objetivamos refletir sobre a tensão, a violência e o conflito na relação ent...

Edição temática Antropologia e Crise Ambiental. Aborda o conceito de crise ambiental no âmbito do campo de conhecimento antropológico. Reflete sobre a tensão, a violência e o conflito na relação entre a sociedade e a natureza. Em um mundo de recursos naturais finitos, destacamos o despreparo do poder público para lidar com os desafios climáticos e...

Advancing social equity has been implicitly and explicitly central to water resources policy for decades. Yet, equity remains largely outside of standard water resources planning and management practices. Inclusion of equity within water resources infrastructure is inhibited by barriers including an incomplete conceptual understanding of equity, a...

One major challenge of social impact assessment concerns the implementation of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) to ascertain the vulnerability of households to environmental change. While MCDA has been widely used to combine vulnerability indicators into an aggregated vulnerability score, the sensitivity of vulnerability indices to uncertain...

Corruption early in the infrastructure lifecycle creates cascading negative effects and significant conservation impacts. This brief introduces the impacts of corruption on conservation outcomes and anti-corruption methods to mitigate corruption in conservation practices. https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/tnrc-topic-brief-the-impacts-of-infrastr...

Infrastructure must become more resilient as the global climate changes and also more affordable in the economic and political context of a post-COVID world. We can solve this dual challenge and drive global infrastructure investment into a more sustainable direction by taking our cues from Nature.

During the 21st century, human–environment interactions will increasingly expose both systems to risks, but also yield opportunities for improvement as we gain insight into these complex, coupled systems. Human–environment interactions operate over multiple spatial and temporal scales, requiring large data volumes of multi‐resolution information fo...

Human actions through land-use can alter soil phosphorus (P) distribution over time and space as vegetation is altered and added fertilizer P is translocated downslopes by runoff and erosion, or through the soil profile by leaching. In the southeastern US Piedmont, a more than 100-year period of human land-use of forest clearing and farming, which...

Esta coletânea reúne 12 capítulos que destacam o tema da memória ambiental tendo por base pesquisas antropológicas em contextos urbanos. Nosso desafio é o de propor, em termos teóricos e metodológicos, uma etnografia da duração, inspiração que concebemos a partir da leitura da obra de Gaston Bachelard, aplicada aos estudos das paisagens urbanas. Pa...

Globally, rising seas, coastal erosion, extended dry periods, and flooding contribute to decreased water security and increased disaster incidence. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) are increasingly advanced as innovative responses to promote adaptation and build resilience, and they are arguably more sustainable than traditional gray infrastructure. Th...

Although climate change vulnerability research in general has increased over the last decade, Latin American countries have more directed more limited efforts toward vulnerability and its social aspects. To respond to this gap, the authors developed a method to quantify drought vulnerability, which is key climate risk in Brazil. The iSECA model use...

The characteristics of hydroclimatic risk in the 21st Century are rapidly changing. Increases in extreme weather events and population densities alter exposure to floods and droughts. Water infrastructure is unable to keep pace and deterministic models can mislead. Yet, predominant strategies for managing risk continue to follow historical preceden...

Around the world today, the magnitude and rates of environmental, social, and economic change are undermining the sustainability of many rural societies that rely directly on natural resources for their livelihoods. Sustainable development efforts seek to promote livelihood adaptations that enhance food security and reduce social-ecological vulnera...

We present a high-resolution geostatistical analysis of prehistoric archaeological site locations and land use footprints for the South Carolina Piedmont of North America using archaeological survey data, multivariate logistic regression techniques, and fuzzy set theory. Our analysis uses archaeological site locations and generalizations about preh...

We present a high-resolution geostatistical analysis of prehistoric archaeological site locations and land use footprints for the South Carolina Piedmont of North America using archaeological survey data, multivariate logistic regression techniques, and fuzzy set theory. Our analysis uses archaeological site locations and generalizations about preh...

The focus of this study is on how changes in formal and informal institutions have differential impacts across populations in terms of vulnerability of livelihoods to drought, and the unequal processes that shape adaptation to new conditions. Drought vulnerability occurs as a result of exposure and sensitivity to interrelated economic, social, poli...

This paper focuses on how political, economic, and biophysical factors shape institutions that mediate how livelihoods and ecological processes align and interact at Koija, a pastoralist group ranch in Mukogodo Division, Laikipia, Kenya. While there is currently a high-profile emphasis on landscape conservation and maintenance of wildlife mobility...

We test the hypothesis that prehistoric Native American land use influenced the Euro-Amer-ican settlement process in a South Carolina Piedmont landscape. Long term ecological studies demonstrate that land use legacies influence processes and trajectories in complex, coupled social and ecological systems. Native American land use likely altered the...

Data for the Cox proportional hazards model. Model covariates by sample unit Id. (CSV)

Governance of food systems is a poorly understood determinant of food security. Much scholarship on food systems governance is non-empirical, while existing empirical research is often case study-based and theoretically and methodologically incommensurable. This complicates aggregation of evidence and generalization. This paper presents a review of...

This paper presents a data mining study and cluster analysis of social data obtained on small producers and family farmers from six country cities in Ceará state, northeast Brazil. The analyzed data involve demographic, economic, agriculture and food insecurity information. The goal of the study is to establish profiles for the small producer famil...

The 2016 annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology, held in Athens, Georgia, brought together speakers and poster presenters around the theme of risk and resilience. In this introduction to the corresponding issue of Economic Anthropology, we briefly summarize the landscape of past approaches to risk and resilience to situate the nine...

Processes of land degradation and regeneration display fine scale heterogeneity often intimately linked with land use. Yet, examinations of the relationships between land use and land degradation often lack the resolution necessary to understand how local institutions differentially modulate feedback between individual farmers and the spatially het...

The application of Support Vector Machine (SVM) to classify food security in a northeast region in Brazil is explored. This type of application represents a novel use of the SVM in addressing contemporary social science questions. The results demonstrate an accuracy > 75% and a recall of 84% for classifying households that are food insecure. The va...

Governance of food systems is a poorly understood determinant of food security. Much scholarship on food systems governance is non-empirical, while existing research is often case study-based and theoretically and methodologically incommensurable. This frustrates aggregation of evidence and generalisation. We undertook a systematic review of method...

Despite compelling reasons to involve nonscientists in the production of ecological knowledge, cultural and institutional factors often dis-incentivize engagement between scientists and nonscientists. This paper details our efforts to develop a biweekly newspaper column to increase communication between ecological scientists, social scientists, and...

A contínua influência do desenvolvimento participativo, tanto na teoria quanto na prática, destaca o valor de processos de desenvolvimento democráticos e inclusivos. Porém, apesar da sua influência através os anos, a participação ainda encontra os desafios de definir, promover e se tornar um fenômeno empoderador. Aqui reside o “baixo-ventre” teóric...

Sustainable adaptation to climate change needs to be assessed beyond the present time and location to include the way that current forms of adaptation might influence future response options. An analysis of past dynamics of adaptation, what we call “trajectories,” might hold the key to understanding how the adaptive outcomes of past responses to cl...

This article examines the role that civic agriculture in Georgia (US) plays in shaping attitudes, strategies, and relationships that foster both sustainability and adaptation to a changing climate. Civic agriculture is a social movement that attracts a specific type of “activist” farmer, who is linked to a strong social network that includes other...

This paper focuses on the relevance of adaptive capacity in the context of the increasing certainty that climate change impacts will affect human populations and different social groups substantially and differentially. Developing and building adaptive capacity requires a combination of interventions that address not only climate-related risks (spe...

This paper focuses on the relevance of adaptive capacity in the context of the increasing certainty that climate change impacts will affect human populations and different social groups substantially and differentially. Developing and building adaptive capacity requires a combination of interventions that address not only climate-related risks (spe...

This article examines whether some response strategies to climate variability and change have the potential to undermine long‐term resilience of social–ecological systems. We define the parameters of a resilience approach, suggesting that resilience is characterized by the ability to absorb perturbations without changing overall system function, th...

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) and adaptive management (AM) are two institutional and management paradigms designed to address shortcomings within water systems governance – the limits of hierarchical water institutional arrangements in the case of IWRM and the challenge of making water management decisions under uncertainty in the ca...

Adaptation and resilience are two concepts originally developed in dissimilar problem contexts but which are of significant importance for our ability to respond to a changing climate. While both concepts encompass processes of change they differ in several important areas. This article discusses the relationship between the two concepts and highli...

Resilience and vulnerability represent two related yet different approaches to understanding the response of systems and actors to change; to shocks and surprises, as well as slow creeping changes. Their respective origins in ecological and social theory largely explain the continuing differences in approach to social-ecological dimensions of chang...

Introduction Adaptation to the impacts of climate change is happening now. No-one asked for the opportunity to adapt – clearly it is a set of actions in a situation caused by past and present human-induced change and hence a manifestation of past inequitable use of the earth's resources (Adger et al., 2006). But adaptation is a central part of the...

Better understanding of the factors that shape the use of technical knowledge in water management is important both to increase its relevance to decision-making and sustainable governance and to inform knowledge producers where needs lie. This is particularly critical in the context of the many stressors threatening water resources around the world...

ABSTRACT ABSTRACT The phrase persistent vulnerability reflects the enduring relationship of the rural population in Ceará with a highly variable climate. Persistence underscores the historical and unyielding nature of this vulnerability. Yet contrary to once-catastrophic rates of mortality etched in a public consciousness, no one dies from severe...

ABSTRACT In recognition of unavoidable changes that human actions are producing in our environment, the term adaptation has become ubiquitous in the environmental and climate-change literature. Human adaptation is a field with a significant history in anthropology, yet anthropological contributions to the burgeoning field of climate change remain l...

As policy-makers struggle to define the policy agenda to address the challenge of climate change, three distinct influential approaches to climate policy are emerging in the climate change literature: implementing climate change adaptation; reducing social vulnerability; and managing ecosystem resilience. Each of these approaches has been developed...

Understanding local variability in context and mobilising local participation to define development agendas are widely accepted development strategies. There remain, however, significant challenges to the systematic and effective inclusion of local communities and households. Projeto MAPLAN, a pilot project in Ceará, Brazil, is a joint effort of th...

The idea of climate has both statistical and social foundations. Both of these dimensions of climate change over time: climate, as defined by meteorological statistics, changes for both natural and anthropogenic reasons; and our expectations of future climate also change, as cultures, societies and knowledge evolves. This paper explores the interac...

This article was submitted without an abstract, please refer to the full-text PDF file.

Better understanding of the factors that shape the use of technical knowledge in water management is important both to increase its relevance to decision‐making and sustainable governance and to inform knowledge producers where needs lie. This is particularly critical in the context of the many stressors threatening water resources around the world...

While there is a recognised need to adapt to changing climatic conditions, there is an emerging discourse of limits to such adaptation. Limits are traditionally analysed as a set of immutable thresholds in biological, economic or technological parameters. This paper contends that limits to adaptation are endogenous to society and hence contingent o...

Adaptation is a process of deliberate change in anticipation of or in reaction to external stimuli and stress. The dominant research tradition on adaptation to environmental change primarily takes an actor-centered view, focusing on the agency of social actors to respond to specific environmental stimuli and emphasizing the reduction of vulnerabili...

This article examines the meteorological interpretations of phenomenon that are made by careful observers of nature. The climate forecasts, made by the sertanejos and based on empirical observations, have relevance for the probability-based climate forecasts developed by meteorological institutions. In 1998 research was carried out in six different...

This article examines the meteorological interpretations of phenomenon that are made bycareful observers of nature. The climate forecasts, made by the sertanejos and based onempirical observations, have relevance for the probability-based climate forecasts developedby meteorological institutions. In 1998 research was carried out in six different mu...

Este artigo trata da interpretação das manifestações da natureza que estão associadas com as previsões meteorológicas e que é atribuída às pessoas que possuem aguçada sensibilidade de observação. As previsões elaboradas pelos sertanejos, com base em sua experiência empírica, podem ser importantes para as projeções climáticas feitas, com base probab...

This article examines the use of seasonal climate forecasting in public and private efforts to mitigate the impacts of drought in Cear, Northeast Brazil. Here, forecasts have been directed towards small scale, rainfed agriculturalists as well as state and local level policymakers in the areas of agriculture, water management, and emergency drought...

This article examines the use of seasonal climate forecasting in public and private efforts to mitigate the impacts of drought in Ceará, Northeast Brazil. Here, forecasts have been directed towards small scale, rainfed agriculturalists as well as state and local level policymakers in the areas of agriculture, water management, and emergency drought...

The Northeast of Brazil is characterized by a semi-arid environment with highly variable rainfall and frequent drought. Its population, particularly rural inhabitants who practice rainfed agri- culture, are especially vulnerable to climatic extremes that compromise fragile livelihood systems. Since the end of the 19th century, the government has as...

Adapting to climate change is a critical problem facing humanity. This involves reconsidering our lifestyles, and is linked to our actions as individuals, societies and governments. This book presents top science and social science research on whether the world can adapt to climate change. Written by experts, both academics and practitioners, it ex...

Climate studies have traditionally fallen within the purview of the natural sciences where cause and predictable pattern are sought for such phenomena as climate change and climate variability. In the past, social scientists had little occasion to cross disciplinary paths with atmospheric or oceanographic scientists. Not that social science has ign...

Analysis of remotely sensed data at the level of individual farm properties provides additional insights to those derived from a landscape approach. Property-level analysis was carried out by overlaying a property boundary grid in a GIS. Data were derived from aerial photographs for 1970 and 1978 and Landsat Thematic Mapper images for 1985, 1988, a...

This paper explores the use of satellite images and geographical information systems (GIS) for developing a sampling frame, stratifying the sample based on the analysis of remotely sensed information, and as an aid in promoting interview recall on land-use and agricultural strategies during the survey of households. Based on a combination of maps a...