Anthropology
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2211
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Item An Ecolabel for the World Heritage Brand? Developing a Climate Communication Recognition Scheme for Heritage Sites(MDPI, 2020-03-05) Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz; Platts, Ellen J.This study develops a climate communication recognition scheme (CCRS) for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Sites (WHS), in order to explore the communicative power of heritage to mobilize stakeholders around climate change. We present this scheme with the aim to influence site management and tourist decision-making by increasing climate awareness at heritage sites and among visitors and encouraging the incorporation of carbon management into heritage site management. Given the deficits and dysfunction in international governance for climate mitigation and inspired by transnational environmental governance tools such as ecolabels and environmental product information schemes, we offer “climate communication recognition schemes” as a corollary tool for transnational climate governance and communication. We assess and develop four dimensions for the CCRS, featuring 50 WHS: carbon footprint analysis, narrative potential, sustainability practices, and the impacts of climate change on heritage resources. In our development of a CCRS, this study builds on the “branding” value and recognition of UNESCO World Heritage, set against the backdrop of increasing tourism—including the projected doubling of international air travel in the next 15–20 years—and the implications of this growth for climate change. The CCRS, titled Climate Footprints of Heritage Tourism, is available online as an ArcGIS StoryMap.Item Global Climate Change and UNESCO World Heritage(Cambridge University Press, 2023-03-29) Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz; Platts, Ellen J.This article considers the fiftieth anniversary of the 1972 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention in light of climate change, offering a state of the field review of climate responses for World Heritage sites (WHS). Opening with a brief review of UNESCO World Heritage activities around climate change, we then detail the primary impacts and risks that climate change pose for WHS and the reporting and monitoring systems in place to document and track these impacts. Looking forward, we examine the most promising pathways for World Heritage to advance in the domains of climate mitigation, adaptation, climate communication, and climate action.Item Cultural Heritage and Climate Change Adaptation Pathways(2018) Van Dolah, Elizabeth Rebecca; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation seeks to ethnographically understand the role of cultural heritage in climate change adaptation decision-making, and the mechanisms by which heritage is used to shape adaptation pathways for responding to climate-induced socio-ecological changes. Cultural heritage can broadly be understood as the practice of engaging with change through an ongoing social processing of the past. Research on cultural heritage to date has demonstrated the ways that heritage is closely linked to issues of identity, power, and sociocultural processes of change (Lafrenz Samuels 2018). In the context of climate change adaptation, heritage research has much to offer to a growing body of literature that points to the need to better understand the underlying sociocultural factors that affect social resilience and human adaptation (Cote and Nightingale 2012). This dissertation speaks to these calls in approaching heritage as a mechanism for carving climate change adaptation pathways. I explore the role of heritage as an adaptation pathway in the context of a collaborative adaptation planning project called the Integrated Coastal Resiliency Assessment (ICRA), which was carried out on the Deal Island Peninsula, a rural, low-lying area on the Maryland eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. I utilize qualitative methods in semi-structured interviewing, participant observation, and text analysis to ethnographically elucidate a range of heritage threads and to analyze how these threads shape collaborative adaptation decision-making through the ICRA process. Findings from this research identify three overarching heritage themes that are embedded in local Methodist traditions, traditional watermen livelihood practices, and histories of isolation and independence. I demonstrate how these threads are used to frame local understandings of socio-ecological change and climate change vulnerabilities on the Deal Island Peninsula. I also demonstrate how broader heritage deployments in the Chesapeake Bay shape local experiences of vulnerability through processes of disempowerment. I conclude with a discussion of how heritage is integrated into the ICRA process to facilitate a bottom-up decision-making process that re-empowers local actors in governing their own vulnerabilities. The main conclusion from this research points to the importance of considering heritage mobilization in climate change adaptation planning.Item Integrating Environmental Justice and Social-Ecological Resilience for Successful Adaptation to Climate Change: Lessons from African American Communities on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay(2016) Hesed, Christine Danielle Miller; Paolisso, Michael; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research concerns the conceptual and empirical relationship between environmental justice and social-ecological resilience as it relates to climate change vulnerability and adaptation. Two primary questions guided this work. First, what is the level of resilience and adaptive capacity for social-ecological systems that are characterized by environmental injustice in the face of climate change? And second, what is the role of an environmental justice approach in developing adaptation policies that will promote social-ecological resilience? These questions were investigated in three African American communities that are particularly vulnerable to flooding from sea-level rise on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I found that in all three communities, religious faith and the church, rootedness in the landscape, and race relations were highly salient to community experience. The degree to which these common aspects of the communities have imparted adaptive capacity has changed over time. Importantly, a given social-ecological factor does not have the same effect on vulnerability in all communities; however, in all communities political isolation decreases adaptive capacity and increases vulnerability. This political isolation is at least partly due to procedural injustice, which occurs for a number of interrelated reasons. This research further revealed that while all stakeholders (policymakers, environmentalists, and African American community members) generally agree that justice needs to be increased on the Eastern Shore, stakeholder groups disagree about what a justice approach to adaptation would look like. When brought together at a workshop, however, these stakeholders were able to identify numerous challenges and opportunities for increasing justice. Resilience was assessed by the presence of four resilience factors: living with uncertainty, nurturing diversity, combining different types of knowledge, and creating opportunities for self-organization. Overall, these communities seem to have low resilience; however, there is potential for resilience to increase. Finally, I argue that the use of resilience theory for environmental justice communities is limited by the great breadth and depth of knowledge required to evaluate the state of the social-ecological system, the complexities of simultaneously promoting resilience at both the regional and local scale, and the lack of attention to issues of justice.