Title: 4 Human Consequences and Responses | Global Environmental Change: Understanding the Human Dimensions | The National Academies Press
Headings: 4
Human Consequences and Responses

4
Human Consequences and Responses
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN CONSEQUENCES
SOME DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN RESPONSE
Responses to Experienced Versus Anticipated Change
Deliberate Responses Versus Actions with Incidental Effects
Coordinated Versus Uncoordinated Responses
Interventions at Different Points in the Process
THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF CONFLICT
A Current Controversy: To Mitigate or Not to Mitigate?
Implications of Conflict About Human Response
HUMAN RESPONSE: THREE CASES
INTERNATIONAL REGULATION OF OZONE-DEPLETING GASES
THE U.S. ENERGY CONSERVATION ACHIEVEMENTS OF 1973-1985
Preexisting Trends
Uncoordinated Responses to Recent Events
Policy Responses and Implementation
Implications for Future Climate Change
THE HUMAN CONSEQUENCES OF REGIONAL DROUGHT IN THE SAHEL
Different Droughts, Different Responses
Relationship of Policy to Indigenous Response Systems
SEVEN HUMAN SYSTEMS
INDIVIDUAL PERCEPTION, JUDGMENT, AND ACTION
Individual Judgment and Choice
Aggregated Individual Responses
Individuals as Social and Political Actors
MARKETS
SOCIOCULTURAL SYSTEMS
Indigenous Sociocultural Systems of Adaptation to Environment
Social Bonds and Responses to Environmental Change
ORGANIZED RESPONSES OUTSIDE GOVERNMENT
Communities
Social Movements
Corporations and Trade and Industry Associations
NATIONAL POLICY
National Differences in Environmental Policy
The Environmental Decision-Making Process
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION
GLOBAL SOCIAL CHANGE
CONCLUSIONS
THE KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR HUMAN RESPONSES IS INHERENTLY VALUE LADEN
HUMAN RESPONSES MUST BE ASSESSED AGAINST A CHANGING BASELINE
HUMAN RESPONSE CAN INVOLVE INTERVENTION ANYWHERE IN THE CYCLE OF CAUSATION
HUMAN RESPONSES AFFECT THE DRIVING FORCES OF GLOBAL CHANGE
NOTES

Content: Responses to Experienced Versus Anticipated Change
People and social institutions may respond to environmental change as it is experienced (post facto) or as it is anticipated. 1 In the past, people responded mainly to experienced environmental change; only in very recent history, because of increasing scientific knowledge, has there been any rational basis for anticipatory responses. Policy makers and others are now faced with a variety of options, some of which involve anticipatory action and some of which depend on awaiting the experience of global change. Deliberate Responses Versus Actions with Incidental Effects
Some human actions can be taken deliberately in response to global change. For instance, people can build dikes to keep out rising seas or reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate global warming. Human actions can also affect human responses to global change incidentally to their intended purposes. For example, European settlement of the Americas gave Europeans and, later, others access to a wider variety of food crops, making human survival less dependent, at least in principle, on a small number of staples that might be vulnerable to altered growing conditions caused by environmental change. World markets have subsequently reduced the number of major staple foods so that, in practice, people may eat no larger a variety of foods than before (Plotkin, 1988). High taxes on gasoline in Europe and Japan, enacted for reasons unrelated to the global environment, encouraged
development and purchase of small, fuel-efficient automobiles that incidentally slow the pace of global warming.