4

Human Consequences and Responses

This chapter examines the range of human consequences of, and responses to, global environmental change. We begin by developing the concept of human consequences and showing why, to understand them, it is critical to understand the variety of human responses to global change. We then offer a framework for thinking about human responses and discuss the pivotal role of conflict. The next section examines three cases that illustrate many of the major factors influencing the human consequences of global change. The following sections describe the human systems that are affected by or respond to global change, and how they interrelate. We conclude by offering some general principles for research and some research implications.

UNDERSTANDING HUMAN CONSEQUENCES

Many human actions affect what people value. One way in which the actions that cause global change are different from most of these is that the effects take decades to centuries to be realized. This fact causes many concerned people to consider taking action now to protect the values of those who might be affected by global environmental change in years to come. But because of uncertainty about how global environmental systems work, and because the people affected will probably live in circumstances very much different from those of today and may have different values, it is hard to know how present-day actions will affect them. To project or forecast the human consequences of global change at some point in the relatively distant future, one would need to know at least the following:

--the future state of the natural environment,

--the future of social and economic organization,

--the values held by the members of future social groups,

--the proximate effects of global change on those values, and

--the responses that humans will have made in anticipation of global change or in response to ongoing global change.

These elements form a dynamic, interactive system (Kates, 1971, 1985b; Riebsame et al., 1986). Over decades or centuries, human societies adapt to their environments as well as influence them; human values tend to promote behavior consistent with adaptation; and values and social organization affect the way humans respond to global change, which may be by changing social organizations, values, or the environment itself.

This complex causal structure makes projecting the human consequences of global change a trickier task than is sometimes imagined. It is misleading to picture human impacts as if global change were like a meteorite striking an inert planet, because social systems are always changing and are capable of anticipation. So, for example, an estimate of the number of homes that would be inundated by a one-meter rise in sea level and the associated loss of life and property may be useful for alerting decision makers to potentially important issues, but it should not be taken as a prediction, because humans always react. Before the sea level rises, people may migrate, build dikes, or buy insurance, and the society and economy may have changed so that people's immediate responses--and therefore the costs of global change--may be different from what they would be in the present.

One may imagine human consequences as the output of a matrix of scenarios. Assume that four sets of scenarios are developed for the futures of the natural environment, social and economic organization, values, and policies. Joining together all combinations of one scenario from each set, and adding assumptions about people's immediate responses, would generate an extensive set of grand scenarios. The human consequences of global change could then be defined as the difference between the state of humanity at the end of one grand scenario and the state of humanity at the end of a base case or reference scenario with a different natural-environment component. By this definition, a particular change in the natural environment has different consequences depending on the scenarios assumed for society, values, and responses.

Building these scenarios, identifying the most probable ones, and assessing their outcomes would be an overwhelming analytic task. Rather than trying to set a research agenda for that task, we undertake in this chapter a less demanding but still very difficult task: to focus on human responses to global change broadly conceived. We do not discuss ways to improve forecasts of the state of the natural environment; that topic is outside the range of human dimensions. Neither do we devote much attention to improving forecasts of social and economic organization or of human values, even though these topics clearly belong to the social sciences and are critical to understanding the effects of global change. We bypass these issues because the need for improved social, economic, and political forecasting is generic in the social sciences, and addressing this broad need would take us far beyond our charge to focus on human-environment interactions. We offer only limited discussion of how future global change might proximally affect what humans value, because the variety of possible global changes and the uncertainty about the effects of each make it far too difficult to go into detail. Instead, we review basic knowledge about how human systems respond to external stresses, in the context of discussing human responses.

In our judgment, understanding human responses is key to understanding the human consequences of global change. We do not mean to downplay the importance of certain kinds of research that do not focus explicitly on responses. Two such research traditions, in particular, are highly relevant. The impact-assessment tradition involves projecting the human consequences of a range of natural-environment scenarios under given assumptions about human response. The tradition of post hoc case analysis involves assessing the actual human outcomes after past environmental changes land given the responses that actually occurred), in the hope of drawing more general conclusions. Research in these traditions, combined with analysis of human response, can offer valuable insights into the human consequences of global change. We discuss that research as appropriate in this chapter and in Chapter 5.

SOME DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN RESPONSE

The human responses relevant to global change differ along several dimensions. We consider the following analytic distinctions useful for thinking about the range of responses available.

Responses to Experienced Versus Anticipated Change

People and social institutions may respond to environmental change as it is experienced (post facto) or as it is anticipated. (1) In the past, people responded mainly to experienced environmental change; only in very recent history, because of increasing scientific knowledge, has there been any rational basis for anticipatory responses. Policy makers and others are now faced with a variety of options, some of which involve anticipatory action and some of which depend on awaiting the experience of global change.

Deliberate Responses Versus Actions with Incidental Effects

Some human actions can be taken deliberately in response to global change. For instance, people can build dikes to keep out rising seas or reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate global warming. Human actions can also affect human responses to global change incidentally to their intended purposes. For example, European settlement of the Americas gave Europeans and, later, others access to a wider variety of food crops, making human survival less dependent, at least in principle, on a small number of staples that might be vulnerable to altered growing conditions caused by environmental change. World markets have subsequently reduced the number of major staple foods so that, in practice, people may eat no larger a variety of foods than before (Plotkin, 1988). High taxes on gasoline in Europe and Japan, enacted for reasons unrelated to the global environment, encouraged development and purchase of small, fuel-efficient automobiles that incidentally slow the pace of global warming. By bringing about technological change, these taxes also incidentally have helped make it easier for all countries--even those without high gasoline taxes or companies that produce fuel-efficient automobiles--to respond to the challenge of global warming with improved energy efficiency .

Changes in society that incidentally affect human responses to global change are important both directly and because they could become tomorrow's deliberate responses. For example, gasoline taxes, which were not initiated with the global environment as a consideration, could be increased to cut CO2 emissions. Studies of the incidental effects of such actions might inform decision makers about what could happen without deliberate intervention and about which present policies might make societies more robust in the face of global change. Both kinds of knowledge are essential for informed policy debates.

Coordinated Versus Uncoordinated Responses

Response to global change may be coordinated, as through the policies of governments or trade associations aimed at eliciting the same action from many actors, or uncoordinated, as with independent actions of households or small firms. Both types of response can be either anticipatory or post facto; both can affect global change either deliberately or incidentally. Moreover, coordinated and uncoordinated responses can be connected to each other, in that coordinated actions by governments and industries can create new options for uncoordinated actors, prohibit responses, or raise or lower their costs.

Interventions at Different Points in the Process

Figure 4-1 elaborates on Figure 2-2 to show how human action can intervene at any point in the cycle of interaction between human and environmental systems to protect against threats to what humans value. We offer the following rough distinctions among types of interventions. (2)

The term mitigation is generally used to describe interventions on the human causes side of the diagram. Mitigation includes all actions that prevent, limit, delay, or slow the rate of undesired impacts by acting directly or indirectly on environmental systems. Mitigation can operate at various points in the causal cycle. It may involve direct interventions in the environment (type E in the figure) to counteract the effects of other human actions, direct interventions in the proximate human causes (type P), and interventions in the human systems (type H) that drive global change, intended to have an indirect or downstream effect on the proximate causes.

For example, global warming is the direct result of a change in the earth's radiative balance; humans can mitigate global warming by any actions that slow the rate of change or limit the ultimate amount of change in the radiative balance. (3) They can intervene in the environment (type E), for example by directly blocking incident solar radiation with orbiting particles or enhancing the ocean sink for carbon dioxide by adding nutrients. They can intervene in the proximate causes (type P), by regulating automobile use or engine design to cut carbon dioxide emissions or limiting the use of certain nitrogen fertilizers to reduce nitrous oxide emissions. They can intervene in human systems (type H) and indirectly control the proximate causes, by investing in research on renewable energy technologies to replace fossil fuel or providing tax incentives for more compact settlements to lower demand for transportation.

Mitigation of ozone depletion might, in principle, involve release of substances that interact chemically with CFCs, producing compounds with benign effects on the stratospheric ozone layer (type E), limiting emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and other gases that deplete ozone (type P), or developing alternative methods of cooling buildings that do not rely on CFCs (type H). Mitigation of threats to biological diversity might include, at least in principle, engineering new varieties, species, or even ecosystems to save diversity, if not individuals (type E); limiting widespread destruction of tropical forests, estuaries, and other major ecosystems (type P); or promoting systems of land tenure and agricultural production that decrease the pressure for extensive development of tropical forests (type H).

Humans can intervene in several ways on the response side of the cycle. Such actions are sometimes generically called adaptation, but there are important distinctions among them. One type of response, which can be called blocking, prevents undesired proximate effects of environmental systems on what humans value. It can be described by example. If global climate change produces sufficient warming and drying (drought) on a regional scale, it may threaten the region's crops; development and adoption of drought-resistant crops or crop strains can break the connection between environmental change (drought) and famine by preventing crop failure. Similarly, loss of stratospheric ozone threatens light-skinned humans with skin cancer, through exposure to ultraviolet radiation; avoidance of extreme exposure to sun and application of sunscreens help prevent cancer, although they do not mitigate the destruction of the ozone layer. Tropical deforestation threatens species with extinction by eliminating their habitats; creation of forest preserves would provide many species sufficient habitat to survive, while doing little to slow net deforestation.

Another type of adaptive response is to prevent or compensate for losses of welfare that would otherwise result from global change. Such actions can be called adjustments. (4) They neither mitigate environmental change nor keep it from affecting what people value, but rather intervene when a loss of welfare is imminent or after it has begun to be manifest. Examples include evacuation from areas stricken with flood or drought, food shipments or financial assistance to those remaining in such areas, and development of synthetic substitutes for products previously obtained from extinct species. (5)

Yet another type of response, sometimes called anticipatory adaptation, aims to improve the robustness of social systems, so that an unchecked environmental change would produce less reduction of values than would otherwise be the case. (6) This type of intervention does not alter the rate of environmental change, but it lowers the cost of any adjustments that might become necessary. It can be distinguished, at least in theory, from type H mitigation in that it does not necessarily alter the driving forces of global change. An example is diversification in agricultural systems. Farmers, regions, and countries that rely on a range of crops with different requirements for growth may or may not produce less greenhouse or ozone-depleting gases than monoculturists. But polycultures are more robust in the face of drought, acid deposition, and ozone depletion. There may be crop failure, but only in some crops. Similarly, families and communities that have both agricultural and nonagricultural income are harmed less by the same threats than purely agricultural groups. They have other sources of income and can purchase crops from elsewhere. (7)

All social systems are vulnerable to environmental change, and modern industrial societies have different vulnerabilities from earlier social forms. Modern societies have built intricate and highly integrated support systems that produce unprecedented material benefits by relying critically on highly specialized outputs of technology, such as petrochemical fertilizers and biocides; hybrid seeds; drugs and vaccines; and the transmission of electricity, oil, and natural gas from distant sources. Although these complex sociotechnical systems contain great flexibility through the operation of global markets, they may have vulnerabilities that reveal themselves in the face of the changes that these systems have helped create. For instance, modern societies have become highly dependent on fossil fuels and vulnerable to a serious disruption of supply or distribution systems. They also support much larger and denser populations than ever before; such populations may be vulnerable to ecological changes affecting the viability of their food supplies.

Evidence from studies of disasters suggests that the poor, who lack diversified sources of income, political influence, and access to centralized relief efforts, tend to be worst off (Erikson, 1978; Kroll-Smith et al., 1991; Mileti and Nigg, 1991). However, studies to assess the vulnerabilities of larger human systems, such as national or world food or energy systems, are rarely done (e.g., Rabb, 1983). The far side of vulnerability is also little studied: When a system fails to resist environmental pressure, under what conditions does it return to its previous state? If it undergoes permanent change, what determines the nature of the new state?

The Pivotal Role of Conflict

An important consequence of global environmental change is conflict, because global change affects what humans value, and different people value different things. When U.S. energy use threatens the global climate or land clearing in Brazil threatens the extinction of large numbers of species, people around the world are understandably concerned. They may express a desire--or even claim a right--to influence the choices of people or governments continents away. And the people or countries subjected to those claims may resist, especially when they feel that changing their behavior will mean suffering. The further global change proceeds, the more likely it seems that it will be a source of conflict, including international conflict, over who has a right to influence the activities implicated as causes, who will pay the costs of responding, and how disputes will be settled.

A Current Controversy: To Mitigate or Not to Mitigate?

One of the most heated policy debates about responses to a global change is between advocates of immediate efforts to mitigate global warming and those who would postpone such action. This debate arose within the committee, even though we were not charged with recommending strategies for response to global change. We offer the following brief, sharply stated version of the debate to highlight some important characteristics of controversies about global change: that they are partly, but not entirely, fact-based; that they are likely to persist even in the face of greatly increased knowledge about the causes of global change; and that they are pervasive, even in discussions restricted to research priorities .

In one view, the wise course of action on global warming is to conduct research on the phenomenon but not to take action to slow or mitigate it until the phenomenon is better understood. Proponents of this view make the following arguments:

1.Uncertainty of global change. The nature and extent of global warming in the future is highly uncertain because of incomplete knowledge of the relevant properties of the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, and other relevant systems. It is wasteful for society to expend resources to prevent changes that will not occur anyway. Moreover, the mitigation efforts may themselves set in motion undesired changes.

2. Adjustment will make mitigation unnecessary. Human systems can adjust to global climate changes much faster than they are likely to occur. The projected doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will take place about 80 years from now. By contrast, financial markets adjust in minutes, administered-market prices in weeks, labor markets in years, and the economic long run is usually reckoned at no more than two decades. The implication for action is that what individuals and organizations do on their own in anticipating climate change may be sufficiently successful that organized, governmental responses will be superfluous. The impact of climate change will reach people through slow price increases for the factors of production; in reasonably well-functioning markets, economic actors adapt readily to such changes. They invent industrial processes that economize on scarce inputs, find substitutes, purchase energy-efficient equipment when energy prices are rising, and so forth. In the past, such adjustments have contributed to human progress, and there is every reason to expect that pattern to continue.

3. Don't fight the wrong war. It makes no sense to act like the generals who built the Maginot Line for the wrong war or to construct dikes for cities whose populations will have moved or dams to water crops that will be grown elsewhere. Technological and social changes often eliminate problems without any specific mitigation efforts by changing the offending technology or making it obsolete. For example, boilers no longer explode on trains because they no longer use steam engines; horses are no longer the main polluters of urban streets. Concern about the greenhouse effects of fossil fuel burning will prove premature if development of fusion or solar energy technology can replace most fossil fuel use over the next 50 years.

4. Better policy options may lie on the horizon. Further research may identify more effective and less costly interventions than those now available. For example, it has recently been suggested that adding iron to the oceans to fertilize phytoplankton that would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere may be a way to address the greenhouse effect (Martin et al., 1990). That proposal, whatever its ultimate feasibility or desirability (Lloyd, 1991), demonstrates that improved understanding of biogeochemical systems might generate promising new proposals for mitigating global change. Improved understanding of social systems has reasonable potential to discover other classes of effective response.

5. It may be more costly to act now. Actions that can be postponed will be less burdensome because of continuing economic progress. If people living in the 1890s had invested in preventing today's environmental problems, their expense on our behalf would probably have been made on the wrong problems, and it would have been an inequitable transfer of resources from a poorer generation to a richer one. It probably makes no more sense for the current generation to sacrifice to benefit a future, even wealthier generation. This is the argument for a positive social discount rate. It assumes that expenditures made now could otherwise be invested at compound interest in improvements in human well-being. If the growth rate for such investment exceeds the average rate at which environmental problems develop, people will be better off in the future if they do not spend on mitigation now.

Proponents of immediate mitigative action make the following arguments:

1. Action now is more feasible and effective than action later. It is in the nature of exponential growth processes that the earlier the growth rate decreases, the greater the final effect. Bringing down the birth rate in India to two children per couple in 1995 rather than in 2005 can make a difference of 300 million people by the time the Indian population stabilizes (Meadows, 19851. To achieve the same effect by starting later would impose greater restrictions on the people living at that time. It is therefore easier to mitigate the effects of exponential growth the sooner the effort is made.

2. It is easier to adjust to slower change. Mitigation is prudent because of the long time lags in the global environmental system. By the time it becomes clear that a response is needed, it may be too late to prevent catastrophe if the change is proceeding rapidly. Even if catastrophe is unlikely, mitigation that slows the rate of change makes it more likely that adjustments can be made in time. This is clearly the case for nonhuman organisms, such as tree species that can adjust to climatic change by migrating, as seedlings move to more favorable locations. Such species have a maximum rate of migration, so can adjust to climatic change below that rate. (8) The same principle probably also applies to human adjustments to major environmental change.

3. It is wise to insure against disaster. Mitigation in the face of possibly catastrophic outcomes is like taking out insurance against flood and fire. The insurance expenses are bearable, but the expenses of catastrophe may not be.

4. Avoid irretrievable error. It is wise to mitigate against potentially irretrievable losses. The clearest example is species extinction. If species are valued for themselves, their loss is irretrievable; even if they are valued only for what benefits they may have for humanity, species loss may be irretrievable. Other environmental values, such as loss of the life-supporting capacity of wetlands or large bodies of water, may also be irretrievable; often we do not know until the values are lost.

5. Avoid high-risk environmental experiments. Humans are now conducting large-scale uncontrolled experiments on the global environment by changing the face of the earth and the flows of critical materials at unprecedented rates. It is prudent to limit the pace and extent of such experiments because of the likelihood of unanticipated consequences. Like natural mutations, most of these experiments are probably destined to fail, and there is only one global environment to experiment on. As the extent of human intervention in the global environment continues to increase, so does the strength of this argument. The argument supports mitigation efforts that slow ongoing human interventions in the environment, but generally not those that would stop greenhouse warming by new interventions in the global environment.

6. Economic arguments do not encompass some environmental goods. The discount-rate argument is specious in the general case because the costs and benefits of postponing action are not always commensurable. Some important and meaningful tradeoffs can be made on economic grounds, for instance, between investing in renewable energy development and in directly limiting the burning of fossil fuels. But sometimes the economic logic makes no sense. If current economic activity destroys the life-support systems on which human life depends, what investment at compound interest could ever recoup this cost? Economic arguments also cannot deal with some things--including the balance of nature--on which people place intrinsic or spiritual value. To the extent people want to preserve such values, mitigation is the only acceptable approach. Moreover, economic accountings systematically undervalue things--such as genetic resources--for which there are few property rights or for which economic value is only potential.

7. Some mitigative action is fully justified on other grounds. A good example is investments in energy efficiency that provide an excellent return on investment even with narrow economic calculations. Such actions can achieve the benefits of mitigation at no extra cost, while providing other benefits.

Implications of Conflict About Human Response

Many controversies are beginning to develop out of concerns with global change. One pits Third World countries against the developed countries that are now becoming concerned with limiting use of fossil fuels and restricting the felling of tropical forests. The Third World position, of course, is that other countries used fossil fuels and undeveloped frontiers for their economic development, and fairness dictates that the poorer nations now have their turn. Many analysts believe that if large-scale climate change results from human activities, the poorer countries are likely to suffer most because they lack resources they could use to adapt. Such an outcome would produce yet other conflicts.

The controversies about global change are only partly fact-based. True, some of the disagreements might fade with better knowledge about the global environment and the likely effects of different feasible responses. As it became clear that expected global warming over the next 50 years could not cause the breakup of the West Antarctic icecap, the flood-prevention rationale for slowing greenhouse gas emissions became considerably weaker. A response such as dike building seems much more appropriate when the sea threatens only a few areas. And if it became clear what each policy option--at the local, national, and international levels--would accomplish if enacted, some of them could easily be rejected.

But knowledge often fails to resolve controversy. It frequently raises new disputes or calls old beliefs into question. And even when new knowledge reduces uncertainty, controversies persist because not only facts, but also important interests and values, are at stake. Informed people disagree because the remaining uncertainty leaves room for judgment, because they may assume different scenarios about the future of society, and because an outcome that harms what one person values may enhance what another values. Those impressed with the potential benefits of economic growth tend to line up against those who fear of the potential costs; those with a strong faith in the ability of human ingenuity to solve life's problems line up against those awed by what is at stake; those who stand to benefit from an outcome line up against those who stand to lose. When faced with choices, some prefer international solutions to global problems, others see national action as more feasible; some favor market adaptations, others, community-based action outside the market and the state; some are attracted to large-scale technological solutions, others see them as cures that may be worse than the disease. In short, the debates are not only about the workings of human and environmental systems, but also about political and economic interests, conflicting values and faiths, differing assumptions about the future, and different judgments about resiliency in the face of the unexpected.

Research on Conflict Studies of environmental and technological conflict are a significant part of social research on conflict (e.g., Nelkin, 1979; Mazur, 1981; Freudenburg and Rosa, 1984; Jasper, 1988; Clarke, 1989). Issues of global environmental change have all the features characteristic of the most difficult technological controversies: awareness of human influence on the hazards, serious worst-case possibilities, the possibility of widespread and unintended side effects, delayed effects not easily attributable to specific causes, and lack of individual control over exposure National Research Council, 1989b:57-62).

Social science can help illuminate the nature of environmental controversies and evaluate ways of managing them. Social scientists interested in environmental policy have studied the conditions shaping and favoring the resolution of environmental controversies and the role of scientific, governmental,- and mass media communication in the decision process (e.g., Dietz and Rycroft, 1987; Gould et al., 1988; Jasanoff, 1990; Nelkin, 1979, 1988; National Research Council, 1989b). Some have begun to consider the various ways environmental change might lead to conflicts with the potential for violence (e.g., Homer-Dixon, 1990).

Social scientists specializing in conflict have developed generalizations that might be more thoroughly applied to environmental conflict. For example, conflicts may be based mainly on ideology, interest, or understanding (Aubert, 1963; Glenn et al., 1970; Rapoport, 1960, 1964; Hammond, 1965; von Winterfeldt and Edwards, 1984; Syme and Eaton, 1989), and different types of conflict tend to yield to different tactics of resolution (e.g., Druckman and Zechmeister, 1973; Druckman et al., 1977). Defining an environmental conflict as either one of understanding or one of interests and values affects which groups and arguments are considered legitimate in policy debates (Dietz et al., 1989). The nature of the relationship between the parties to a conflict can determine whether the conflict focuses on ideological positions (e.g., Campbell, 1976; Zartman and Berman, 1982), differences in understanding (e.g., Axline, 1978), or differences in interests (e.g., Strauss, 1978). And the behavior of the parties to a conflict depends on the pattern and relative strength of incentives to compete and to cooperate (e.g., Pruitt and Kimmel, 1977), the probability of continued interaction in the future (e.g., Axelrod, 1984), and on whether two or more parties are involved (Groennings et al., 1970; Hopmann, 1978; Putnam, 1988).

More research seems warranted to use existing knowledge about conflict to illuminate the ways social conflict may result from global environmental change. This research would investigate the ways environmental changes may affect organized social groups and their resource bases and would hypothesize links between those effects and conflict. A first step is to construct an analytical framework for identifying the possible routes from particular environmental changes to particular types of conflict. The framework of Homer-Dixon (1990) provides a start, for causes of violent conflict. Case analyses of past social conflicts can be used to assess hypotheses drawn from such analytic frameworks.

Research on Conflict Resolution and Management Social scientists have also identified a number of approaches for resolving or managing policy disputes, some of which are beginning to be studied in the context of environmental conflicts. These include mediation techniques intended to address the value dimension of environmental conflict (e.g., Ozawa and Susskind, 1985); facilitation procedures that emphasize problem-solving discussions and have proved useful as a prelude to negotiation (Burton, 1986; Druckman et al., 1988); techniques of separating values from interests to makes conflicts appear smaller and easier to solve (Fisher, 1964; but see Druckman, 1990); efforts to focus on shared principles for decisions (Zartman and Berman, 1982) or to discuss values as ranked priorities rather than ideological differences (Seligman, 1989); policy exercises that emphasize creative use of scientific knowledge to solve environmental problems (Brewer, 1986; Toth, 1988a, b); and computer software for dealing with the cognitive and political aspects of both conflicts over the interpretation of data for environmental management (Hammond et al., 1975; Holling, 1978).

The nature of technological conflicts suggests, however, that over the long term, management is a more realistic goal than stable resolution. Recent work on risk communication is potentially relevant to social responses to global change because global change problems, like those to which that literature refers, are characterized by high levels of scientific uncertainty and great potential for conflict about social choices (Covello et al., 1987; Davies et al., 1987; Fischhoff, 1989; National Research Council, 1989b; Stern, 1991). This work suggests that institutions responsible for decisions about global change will also have to manage conflict. These institutions will need to provide accurate information, but should not expect information to resolve conflict. The institutions will need to make a place for the stakeholders to be represented from the earliest stages of the decision process, ensure openness in processes of policy decision, include mechanisms for the main actors to have access to relevant information from sources they trust, and use the conflicting perspectives and interpretations of current knowledge and uncertainty to inform the ongoing debate (National Research Council, 1989b; Stern, 1991).

Research Needs. Relatively little is known about the structure of particular conflicts about global change at the local, national, and international levels or about which means will be most effective in dealing with them. Therefore, we recommend increased empirical research, including both field studies and laboratory-simulation studies, to clarify the sources and structures of particular environmental conflicts and to test the efficacy of alternative techniques for their resolution and institutions for their management.