RAPID: El Niño Southern Oscillation Events, Migration, and Resilience

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports scientific research on processes that foster social-ecological resilience in the face of global climatic changes. Researchers have found that the capacity of a system to withstand shocks and uncertainties is a property of a system's overall resilience, not just the resilience of the specific component under stress. Some aspects of a social-ecological system, such as cultural worldviews, are more resistant to change and change more slowly than other aspects, such as rules and norms, which change more quickly. Surprisingly, while systems for allocating resources generally change fastest of all, little is known about how this actually happens and how the changes work their way through the system as a whole to finally affect rules, norms, and worldviews. At a time when resources throughout the world are increasingly under stress from war, population movement, and natural disasters, it is critical for policy makers and citizens, as well as scientists, to understand the social processes through which resource reallocation is achieved when a social-ecological system is under stress. Therefore, anthropologist Dr. Jerry Jacka (University of Colorado, Boulder) will return to the highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), where he has been investigating the relationships between resilience and vulnerability since 1998. The highland social-ecological system is currently under stress because of an El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event. ENSOs, which are caused by variations in the surface temperature of the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean, happen irregularly but when they do, the effects can be devastating. Horticulturalists in highlands PNG are severely impacted during strong El Niños because the accompanying frosts and droughts devastate their subsistence food crops. During previous ENSO weather events, highland people migrated to lower altitude areas, where they could find temporary accommodation with lowland residents. However, economic development, population pressures, and changes in the governance of and access to natural resources are restricting these traditional responses. This affords the researcher an opportunity to observe the processes by which new responses are developed. Data will be gathered through ethnographic fieldwork. Local resource managers from four communities (two migrating communities and two host communities who take the migrants in) will be interviewed to understand the decisions and practices related to mitigating vulnerabilities to ENSO events. Research participants will also engage in rankings of risks and concept mapping to understand how El Niños are characterized and conceptualized in a diversity of livelihood contexts. Government and non-governmental officials will be interviewed to look at regional and state-level responses to the climate crisis. Findings from this research will illuminate the factors that promote social-ecological resilience and will be generalizable to other contexts and other stresses.