HSD: Marginality in a Marginal Environment: An Agent-Based Approach to Population-Environment Relationships

As a consequence of global climate change, intra- and inter-annual variability in precipitation and air temperature are expected to increase. Droughts may become more severe, more frequent, more prolonged. Flooding due to excessive rainfall may also be a more common occurrence. The investigators undertaking this interdisciplinary research project hypothesize that across multiple social and spatial-temporal scales, marginal populations are especially likely to be affected by weather-related events, partly because of their location in marginal environments and also because of dynamic feedbacks involving human behavior. To test this hypothesis, the investigators will construct an agent-based simulation model for Nang Rong, a study site in Northeast Thailand with unusually detailed data. The simulation model will be the first to incorporate feedbacks involving out-migration, return migration, marriage, residential choice, and household division in a spatially explicit model with land use as a key outcome. It will incorporate dynamic social networks as both cause and consequence of behavioral change at the individual and household level. The position of households within village networks, and the structure of these networks overall, is important to understanding ecological and social vulnerability and resilience. Marginal households strongly linked to other households in the village may be better able to weather bad years over the long as well as the short run. A substantial literature has explored the impact of social networks for migration and other outcomes but not the consequences of migration for social networks. The Nang Rong data are unique in having complete social networks for 51 villages, making it possible to model social networks endogenously in a way that is a real departure from the past. In rural Thailand, young adults leaving their villages to find work in the city and later returning affect the social location of their origin household and also network structure at the village level. The methods of assessment to be used in this project also will be innovative. In addition to standard approaches to validation, the project will borrow and extends techniques from the fields of meteorology and control theory to develop new tools that will substantially improve the quality and efficiency of sensitivity analysis.

Disasters large and small have the capacity to exacerbate inequalities at multiple levels. The tsunami in Thailand and Indonesia and Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. have attracted much attention, but events occurring at a more local scales, with less fanfare but often much greater frequency, are equally important. Researchers from two continents will be collaborating on this study of the impact of floods and droughts as well as economic booms and crises on the adaptation of households and villages and trends in inequality in the short and longer run. Knowledge of the social responses to environmental change is important in anticipating the likely consequences of such change. The project will integrate perspectives and tools of social demography, sociology, environmental geography, systems modeling, applied mathematics, and geographic information science, contributing to progress in each of the disciplines as well as to an emerging interdisciplinary hybrid, land-change science.

Principal Investigator: Barbara Entwisle

CPC Fellow Investigators: Ronald R. Rindfuss, Stephen J. Walsh

Funding Source: National Science Foundation

Grant Number: 0728822

Funding Period: 09/01/07-02/28/11