Bachelor of Arts in Human Dimensions of Climate Change

University of Maine

Climate Change is one of the leading environmental and human problems facing the world today. Melting glaciers and rising oceans with landward-moving shorelines are one side of the issue, and shifting temperature and moisture patterns and the responses of earth’s biota to these changes add to the dilemma. The other side of the problem is the human dimension, both with regards to impact and response. Humans contribute to global warming and environmental degradation, and humans alone can provide solutions to these problems through successful policy initiatives at local through global scales. Solutions to the many problems arising from climate change will only be found with an understanding of the processes that govern both climate and human culture. Successful policy decisions to mitigate climate change will be based on solid science and social science related to culture. Social scientists have an extremely important role to play in assisting state, national, and world decision makers in understanding environmental problems and finding solutions to them. Social scientists work with policy makers, conduct research among local populations around the world, and on the basis of this work devise policies that take into account the social and cultural implications of policy decisions from local to international scales. With core faculty situated in the Anthropology Department, this degree program addresses these important dimensions of climate change. Anthropologists draw their data from all known human societies. Social anthropologists conduct extended periods of fieldwork in communities around the world physical anthropologists and archaeologists reconstruct those of the past. As a result of this work, anthropologists have built up robust models and explanations of similarity and variance across cultures. They are unusually well equipped to investigate and understand responses to climate change by people whose cultural backgrounds may be radically different from those of the western world. They have a detailed knowledge of how environment and climate shape cultures, and of how cultures shape their environments. They are also able to devise policies that take cultural differences into account in devising and managing climatic solutions.

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences