A Faculty Working Group on Global Climate Disruptions

Faculty Liason

Aftab Jassal (Anthropology)

Faculty

Jennifer Burney (GPS)
Teevrat Garg (GPS)
Aftab Jassal (Anthropology)
Steve Parish (Anthropology)
V. Ramanathan (Scripps Institute of Oceanography)
Saiba Varma (Anthropology)
Matthew Vitz (History)

Graduate Student Participants

Sofia Lana (Anthropology)
Rabindra Willford (Anthropology)

Goals and Themes

Our distinguished colleague from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, V. Ramananthan, recommends that we shift from speaking of climate change to speaking of climate disruption. Disruption more accurately describes the impact climate change is already having on human life around the world. And it better reflects the inescapable intensification of
these impacts in the near future.

Our group places particular emphasis on how climate disruption is affecting the global south, particularly Mexico and Latin America, South Asia, and Africa. Our premise is that knowledge is essential for understanding disruptions, but also that it constitutes a vital connector in the face of disruptive change—facing the challenges of climate disruptions will require that knowledge be connected across disciplines, across communities and populations, across regions and countries, across geographies and ecologies, and across time scales. The focus is global, because disruptions are global, but equally local and regional, because global processes have local and regional consequences. We envision productive conversations from these workshops that help us understand how climate solutions can connect human processes that are local, regional, and global in scale and impact.