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: We do not discuss ways to improve forecasts of the state of the natural environment; that topic is outside the range of human dimensions. Neither do we devote much attention to improving forecasts of social and economic organization or of human values, even though these topics clearly belong to the social sciences and are critical to understanding the effects of global change. We bypass these issues because the need for improved social, economic, and political forecasting is generic in the social sciences, and addressing this broad need would take us far beyond our charge to focus on human-environment interactions. We offer only limited discussion of how future global change might proximally affect what humans value, because the variety of possible global changes and the uncertainty about the effects of each make it far too difficult to go into detail. Instead, we review basic knowledge about how human systems respond to external stresses, in the context of discussing human responses. In our judgment, understanding human responses is key to understanding the human consequences of global change. We do not mean to downplay the importance of certain kinds of research that do not focus explicitly on responses. Two such research traditions, in particular, are highly relevant. The impact-assessment tradition involves projecting the human consequences of a
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range of natural-environment scenarios under given assumptions about human response.