Initiative for Climate Action Research and Understanding through the Social Sciences ( ICARUS)

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), National Science Foundation (NSF) and Stern Reports call for greater social science engagement in discussions about climate change mitigation and adaptation. ICARUS responds to this call. Vulnerability and adaptation have emerged as key concepts in the social science literature on climate change. Both concepts have long, inter-linked histories. Scholars from various disciplines working on development, acute disasters, and slowly-unfolding crises like hunger, famine, and dislocation have contributed insights on the meanings and drivers of vulnerability. Meanwhile, scholars in diverse fields in social and ecological sciences are developing systematic ideas about adaptation. The applicability of these two bodies of work to climate-related stress and crisis remains a vigorous arena of discussion.

ICARUS seeks to develop vulnerability and adaptation theory in order to improve understanding of the inter-related concepts of vulnerability and adaptation. ICARUS is building and applying innovative frameworks and approaches to understanding social dimensions of climate phenomena. The Initiative conduct research in six areas: (i) frameworks for understanding vulnerability and adaptation; (ii) forms, drivers, and outcomes of vulnerability and adaptation; (iii) contextual conditions that affect vulnerability or the prospects for successful adaptation; (iv) configurations of public policies relevant to vulnerability and adaptation; (v) types of private and civic action that reduce vulnerability and support adaptation; and (vi) interactions between environmental, social, and individual-level factors that influence institutional structures and global climate change.

Since 2010, ICARUS hosts an annual ICARUS conference. These conferences contribute to international debates through publications and through engagement in forums such as the International Conference on Climate and Sustainable Development in Drylands (see below). The first conference, ICARUS I, on “Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation: Theory and Cases” was held in February 2010 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, hosted SDEP and the Beckman Institute and the School of Earth Society and Environment.

ICARUS II, “Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation: Marginal Peoples and Environments,” was held at the University of Michigan in May 2010, hosted by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions ( IFRI) Research Initiative and the School of Natural Resources and Environment ( SNRE). Over two hundred researchers attended.

ICARUS III will be held at Columbia University in New York City in May 2012. It will be hosted by the Department of Anthropology. Dates and a call for papers will be announced on the ICARUS web page by December 2011. Calls for participation can be found at on the ICARUS workshops website.

ICARUS is directed by Jesse Ribot (UIUC), Maria-Carmen Lemos (University of Michigan), Arun Agrawal (University of Michigan), Ben Orlove (Columbia University).

Project Status: Core SDEP activity and seeking additional funding.

Climate and Sustainable Development in Drylands Project.

Thirty-five percent of Earth’s people live in arid and semi-arid lands. These drylands cover forty-one percent of the planet and closely follow maps of world poverty. While already exposed to climate extremes, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC,), drylands are likely to be severely hit by climate change. However, the concerns of populations living on these lands remain underrepresented in climate-action and development discussions.

SDEP, along with the Ministry of the Environment in Brazil, co-organized the Second International Conference on Climate, Sustainability and Development in Semi-arid Regions (ICID 2010). The ICID meeting was held on August 12-22, 2010, and brought together governments, civil society and experts to assess and articulate the needs and opportunities of the world’s semi-arid regions, around the following themes:

• Identify and focus actions on challenges and opportunities for a better future in the world’s arid and semi-arid regions.
• Update and share experience and knowledge on matters concerning semi-arid regions in the last 20 years, such as environmental and climate variability and change, vulnerabilities, impacts, and responses of adaptation and sustainable development;
• Explore synergies among the conventions of the United Nations (UN) concerning the development of semi-arid regions;
• Formulate recommendations to support national and global policy processes to inform civil society and development practitioners to achieve sustainable economic, environmental, and social development in the world’s semi-arid regions.

ICID 2010 aimed to support the 2012 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio+20). ICID 2010 generated, published, and presented recommendations to guide governments and other parties in order to reduce the vulnerability of people in drylands, and enhance social and ecological sustainability in arid and semi-arid lands.

Project Status: Funded and in progress. The Climate and Sustainable Development in Drylands Project is building SDEP’s and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s contribution to the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.

Water in a Changing Climate: Access and Security in Indian Cities

Water comprises a core area for SDEP researchers and cuts across both key thematic areas. Recently completed research has studied urban water politics in South Asia and, in particular, the challenges facing expanding metropolitan regions such as Bangalore. Current research is investigating the political economy of water access under scenarios of utility restructuring, the historical geography of water infrastructure, transnational water governance, collective action around water, and sustainable water management. In addition, research is connecting water access issues to concerns over climate change vulnerability and adaptation by examining the relationship between groundwater withdrawal, land subsidence, and flood vulnerability in Manila and Bangalore. This project is led by Malini Ranganathan.

Project Status: Core SDEP activity and seeking additional funding.

Recent SDEP Climate and Society Publications

• Ranganathan, M. In Press. “Financialized and Insurgent: The Dialectics of Participation in Bangalore’s Neoliberal Water Reforms” in K Coelho, Vijaybaskar and L Kamath (Eds), Participolis: Consent and Contention in Neoliberal Urban Governance. Routledge: New Delhi and Abingdon.
• Ranganathan, M.  2011. “The Embeddedness of Cost Recovery: Water Reforms and Associationism at Bangalore’s Fringes” in C McFarlane and J Anjaria (Eds), Urban Navigations: Politics, Space, and the City in South Asia. Routledge: New Delhi and Abingdon.
• Ribot, J. 2011. ‘Vulnerability before Adaptation: Toward Transformative Climate Action’ From Affirmative to Transformative Climate Action’ Global Environmental Change, Vol. 21, No. 4.
• Bohr, J. and B. Dill. 2011. “Who Benefits from Market-Based Carbon Mitigation?” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 10(3/4):406-428.
• Ribot, J. 2011. ‘Seeing REDD for Local Democracy: A Call for Democracy Standards’ Common Voices, Vol. 3, January 2011, pp. 14-16. http://sdep.beckman.illinois.edu/files/Ribot_Redd_CV3.pdf.
• Persha, Lauren, Arun Agrawal, Ashwini Chhatre (2011). Social and Ecological Synergy: Local Rulemaking, Forest Livelihoods, and Biodiversity Conservation. Science 331: 1606-1608.
• Agrawal, Arun, and Ashwini Chhatre (2011). Strengthening Causal Inference through Qualitative Analysis of Regression Residuals: Explaining Forest Governance in the Indian Himalaya. Environment and Planning A 43(2): 328-346.
• Agrawal, Arun, and Ashwini Chhatre (2011). Against mono-consequentialism: Multiple outcomes and their drivers in social-ecological systems. Global Environmental Change 21(1): 1-3.
• T. Bassett.  2010 "Reducing hunger vulnerability through sustainable development." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (13): 5697-5698.
• Ranganathan, M, L Kamath and V Baindur. 2009. “Piped Water Supply to Greater Bangalore: Putting the Cart Before the Horse?” Economic and Political Weekly (44) 33, 53-62.
• Bassett, T.J. and A. Winter-Nelson. 2010. The Atlas of World Hunger. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
• Sikor, Thomas, Johannes Stahl, Thomas Enters, Jesse Ribot, Neera Singh, William D. Sunderlin, and Lini Wollenberg. 2010. REDD-plus, forest people’s rights and nested climate governance. Global Environmental Change. Vol. 20, No.3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.04.007.
• Chhatre, Ashwini, and Arun Agrawal (2009). Synergies and Trade-offs between Carbon Storage and Livelihood Benefits from Forest Commons. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences106:17667-17670
• Ribot, J.C. 2009. Vulnerability does not just come from the sky: framing grounded pro-poor cross-scale climate policy,” In Social Dimensions of Climate Change: Equity and Vulnerability in a Warming World, Robin Mearns and Andrew Norton, Eds. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
• Ribot, J.C., Adil Najam and Gabrielle Watson. 2009. Climate Variation, Vulnerability and Sustainable Development in the Semi-Arid Tropics, In The Earthscan Reader on Adaptation to Climate Change, E. Lisa F. Schipper and Ian Burton, eds. London: Earthscan.
• Suarez, Pablo, Jesse C. Ribot and Anthony G. Patt. 2009. Climate information, equity and vulnerability reduction. In The Distributional Effects of Climate Change: Social and Economic Implications, Matthias Ruth and Maria E. Ibarraran, Eds. Submitted to: Edward Elgar Publishing.