The Global Ethnohydrology Project

Climate change is a topic that has been gaining increased attention in the past couple decades among scientists and the general public, however, the way it is perceived varies even among scientists.  On the one hand, there are scientists that have critically analyzed data to support the idea that global warming is causing climate change which in turn is impacting our ways of life by creating changes in our weather patterns, and intensifying natural events like hurricanes, dry seasons, and floods. On the other hand, there are skeptics who disagree and belief climate change is not happening, and if it is, it is happening on a far distance land. Johanna Wolf and Susanne Moser belief individuals play an important role in responding to climate change because they are the authors who begin and make sure changes to address their concerns are created and maintained (2011). For this reason we propose to focus on climate change-related risk and uncertainty. In this cross-cultural study we would examine three key questions: 1) the extent to which locally grounded perspectives on risk and uncertainty are shared across these diverse sites; 2) we will contrast the profiles (“cultural models”) of each country sample against globally shared ideas to understand better the points of differentiation; and 3) we will test how theoretically-identified factors (e.g. projected climate risk, livelihood profile, views on fatalism) might explain any important points of disparity. We are interested in finding how people make decisions under uncertainty and how that in turns impacts policymaking in relation to current climate change.