As the impacts of climate change grow, society and people struggle to adapt to the challenges of the new reality. Change, however, is difficult, and adapting to new ways of life or new ways of doing business often requires a change in culture.
To determine how culture and society adapt to a changing climate, a team of researchers from the University of Maine and the University of Vermont (UVM) have conducted the first-ever study of cultural adaptation to climate change. Using the science of cultural evolution to examine data on which crops farmers plant across the U.S., their work can help inspire more effective policy solutions to survive in the face of the harmful effects of global warming.
Tim Waring, associate professor with the UMaine Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions and the School of Economics, spearheaded the project.
“Adaptation is about finding a better match to the environment. We know that humans evolve and adapt by changing their culture,” Waring says. “But we know very little about if or how culture is adapting to ongoing climate change today.”
In their paper, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Waring and his colleagues define cultural adaptation as a population-level change, or the spread of a behavior that provides a benefit in a changed environment.
2023-10-31 01:00:04
Original from phys.org rnrn