About

Climate change is one of the world’s most urgent challenges, marked by rising seas, shifting temperatures, and rapidly changing ecosystems, all influenced by human activity. Because people both contribute to and are affected by global warming, effective solutions depend on understanding climate processes as well as human cultures. Strong scientific and social-science foundations are essential for shaping policies that work, and social scientists play a key role by researching communities, advising policymakers, and helping design strategies that address the social and cultural realities of climate action at local, national, and global levels.

With core faculty situated in the Anthropology Department, this degree program addresses these important dimensions of climate change. Anthropologists draw their data from all known human societies. Social anthropologists conduct extended periods of fieldwork in communities around the world; physical anthropologists and archaeologists reconstruct those of the past. As a result of this work, anthropologists have built up robust models and explanations of similarity and variance across cultures. They are unusually well equipped to investigate and understand responses to climate change by people whose cultural backgrounds may be radically different from those of the western world. They have a detailed knowledge of how the environment and climate shape cultures, and of how cultures shape their environments. They are also able to devise policies that take cultural differences into account in devising and managing climatic solutions.