Mission
The Social Dynamics of Environmental and Climate Change (SDECC) working group facilitates and bolsters research on social, community, governmental, and individual processes that impact and are impacted by such changes to create flourishing communities.
Background
Environmental and climatic changes include bio-diversity loss, access to clean water, and more severe weather events and their consequences to all life. Collective impacts of human behavior and the social institutions that govern resource use and interactions with the natural world contribute to these changes. Moreover, these changes significantly affect human lives, health, and well-being in our state, nation, and worldwide. These altered conditions call for responses to each element along this process. Each part of this process affects each other. Such complex natural and social dynamics require attention from social scientists to understand the causes, consequences, and management of environmental and climatic change.
Aims
Many across the university are already working individually or in small groups on these topics. We aim to bring together these researchers to form a community of scholars. This community allows us to keep informed about each other’s work, form collaborations, and connect to resources and opportunities at the university and beyond to facilitate these efforts.
Join us
We meet monthly to assist each other with our research and to share our knowledge and expertise. We also bring in speakers to inform our work and enable our individual and collective efforts to advance our research and the communities we serve.
If you want to be added to the SDECC listserv about upcoming opportunities, please email Janet K. Swim at JSwim@psu.edu.
Please also visit the SSRI event page to find dates for our meetings and events we sponsor.