After two days of technical presentations on climate change and agricultural adaptation strategies, three farmers took the stage at the International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI) and Ethiopian Development Research Institute's (EDRI) workshop "How can African farmers adapt to climate change? Results and conclusions for Ethiopia and beyond." These men had personally experienced farming challenges related to the changing environment. Unlike the previous days' sessions, these men did not talk about the statistical significance of choosing one adaptation strategy over another, or present mathematical models detailing adaptation strategy decision-making. Instead, they talked about their real experiences of hunger, disease, and crop failure. For me, this was the most important information presented at the workshop. I find that qualitative research has the potential to capture this lived experience in ways that quantitative analysis, for all its strengths, simply cannot.
Quantitative analyses are undoubtedly important in adaptation research, in measuring the effects of climate change and uncovering the determinants of individual responses to environmental changes. For example, one presentation entitled "Analyzing the Determinants of Farmers' Choice of Adaptation Methods and Perceptions of Climate Change in the Nile Basin Ethiopia" demonstrated through a mathematical model that farmers' choice of adaptation strategies is significantly and positively related to factors such as age, income, and access to climate change information. However, a model predicting the percent of farmers who will implement an adaptation strategy means something entirely different when that translates into the percent of farmers unable to feed their families, unable to send their children to school, or unable to access health services, and when p-values turn into real experiences of hunger and suffering.
I am in Ethiopia because PAI is conducting a study that seeks to capture this lived experience -- which is currently lacking in climate change literature -- through qualitative research on resilience, adaptation, and the experience of climate change. We hope our qualitative research can support existing quantitative assessments by presenting a more nuanced picture of climate change: a picture with a human face.
Keep going, Kimberly. Very best wishes for 2009.
Thanks for all you are doing to protect the environs from wanton, irreversible degradation and global biodiversity from massive extirpation; to preserve Earth's resources from relentless dissipation and the future of our children from reckless endangerment; to save "the pale blue dot" from the ravages of unbridled global overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities of the human species in these early years of Century XXI.
Many too many economic powerbrokers have been playing "the only game in town" the way everyone "in the know" has been participating in the construction of a leviathan-like "house of cards" called the global political economy.
QUESTION: Can we share an understanding of the many attacks on Earth and climate scientists by saying loudly and clearly that their assailants' activities are venal efforts to spread garbage and junk science, based upon nothing more or less than the duplicitous promulgation of ideological idiocy?
ANSWER: The many arrogant and hostile efforts toward Earth and climate scientists are for the sole purpose of shoring-up and building trust in a con game; to support the most colossal pyramid scheme in human history.....a modern version of the ancient Tower of Babel. Only this modern 'edifice' is an Economic Colossus, one not made of stone but rather built out of filthy lucre as a house of playing cards. The entire game is a patently unsustainable, gigantic ruse perpetrated by a tiny, greedy minority of outrageously conspicuous consumers who are recklessly consolidating and relentlessly hoarding great wealth and power.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176.
Almost a billion people can barely, if at all, feed themselves or their children, and world hunger is reaching pandemic proportions. About a month ago, a resolution went before the floor of the United Nations for a vote, and the resolution was over whether or not food was a fundamental human right. The resolution passed a staggering 180 to 1 vote. 7 nations were absent, and none abstained, but the only country to vote negatively was the United States of America. The richest country, with the greatest of agricultural resources, voted against the idea that human beings have a natural right to be able to feed them selves and survive. A logical justification has to exist for it, and the claim is that the wording of said resolution was not acceptable by American standards, because the alternative is beyond all realms of logic. So if you think that there's some sort of shame to resorting to options like shopping at the Dollar store, or getting payday loans, there isn't any. Be glad those are the options that seem unpalatable, and remember that citizens of the nation of Haiti are literally eating dirt to survive.