The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University is pleased to announce the publication of our new article that investigates global variation in the human experience of environmental hazards. From local knowledge to global patterns: a cross-cultural study of the dimensions of hazards and adaptive capacity was published this January in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction and is now available open access. This research draws upon a global sample of 132 societies to:
- Describe and analyze five key ecological dimensions of environmental hazards, including event type, frequency, onset speed, predictability, and severity.
- Explore how these five dimensions influence human responses and event outcomes.
Our results reveal many generalizable patterns and offer important insights into the process of environmental adaptation. A summary of the article’s findings is available in presentation format here.
This research for this paper was conducted as part of a multi-year interdisciplinary project funded by the Minerva Research Initiative and includes co-authors at HRAF, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health, and Stanford University. It builds upon over 16 years of hazard-related research conducted at HRAF, which aims to understand how cultures adapt and enhance resilience to environmental shocks.
Article Description
Understanding the human impacts of environmental hazards is a growing concern. While there is a plethora of research on climate adaptation, the literature is highly fragmented, and empirical studies are rarely carried out with global samples. This lack of comparative work limits our ability to understand general patterns in how societies adapt, thereby impeding effective policy and practice at a wider scale. To fill this gap, we outline a global comparative approach to the study of hazards that uses ethnographic data. The approach operationalizes five ecological dimensions of environmental hazards, including event type, frequency, onset speed, predictability, and severity, and investigates how they relate across a world-wide sample of 132 nonindustrial societies with significant variation in time and space. We then utilize this approach to explore how specific ecological dimensions might influence the adaptive capacity of societies to respond to events. Findings uncover generalizable patterns that exist across our global sample, suggesting that predictability enhances adaptive capacity, while temporal factors that promote uncertainty (including slow onset speed, longer event duration, and unpredictability) make arriving at adaptive responses more challenging.
Read the full article open access here