Ebola - is culture the real killer?

An opinion piece by Obinna Anyadike, Editor-at-Large, in IRIN: “African culture” – cute if you’re a tourist, catastrophic when you want to put a lid on Ebola, or so some international health experts and media coverage of the outbreak would have us believe.

Why do people persist with risky funeral rites, eat Ebola-harbouring bushmeat, and occasionally attack the very health workers sent to help, the news reports leave us wondering. What is the value of “traditional beliefs” when they are harmful: why can’t people just act more rationally?

The simple answer is; ask the communities. The growing number of researchers that do, find that people are acting as responsibly as they can in desperate circumstances. The lack of a properly functioning Ebola response and weak healthcare services has forced communities into rough and ready self-reliance. Faced with hotlines going unanswered, overcrowded Ebola Treatment Units (ETU), militarized quarantine areas, communities are actually looking for more information, not less.

“Communities will do the best they can given the resources they have, even if ‘un-cultural’, in moments of crisis in order to fight for a future,” a recent study exploring community responses in urban Liberia found. It noted community leaders want training so they can provide safe burials; young men are rallying to guard their neighborhoods against perceived threats; and some people, ill-advisedly, have improvised protection suits out of raincoats and plastic bags to nurse the sick....

Hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, where blood samples are tested for ebola, shot by Leasmhar, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Sea-level rise threatens world heritage sites

Liz Kalaugher in Environmental Research Web: Sea-level rise could threaten cultural world heritage sites, as well as people and infrastructure, near the coast as climate warms. Almost one-fifth of the world’s 720 cultural and mixed heritage sites will be at risk within the next 2000 years if temperature rise reaches 3° above pre-industrial levels, researchers from Austria and Germany have found.

 “Humanity has to take fundamental decisions,” Ben Marzeion of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, told environmentalresearchweb. “Do we look at the impacts [of climate change] and say ‘it was nice to have these cultural heritage sites for a few centuries – let's move on and forget about their future’ or do we want to take actions that will allow us to keep them for future generations? The way we are acting now, we are putting expiration dates on our cultural heritage.”

Together with Anders Levermann from Potsdam University in Germany, Marzeion looked at sea-level rise over the long term for different levels of warming. The pair’s data allowed for thermal expansion of the ocean, ice-sheet melt, glacier melt, changes in the Earth’s gravity field from mass relocation and rotation changes, and the response of the Earth’s crust. Tides, storm surges and subsidence, all of which could bring inundation at an earlier stage, were not included.

 “Almost 20% of the world heritage sites currently enlisted by UNESCO, and about 7% of the currently inhabited places, will be affected directly by sea-level rise for even [a] seemingly modest 3° of global warming,” said Marzeion. “This illustrates the magnitude of the problem we are passing on to future generations.”...

The Sydney Opera House is a World Heritage Site, shot by Christian Mehlführer, User:Chmehl, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license 

Public acceptance of climate change affected by word usage

Timothy Wall in the University of Missouri News Bureau: Public acceptance of climate change’s reality may have been influenced by the rate at which words moved from scientific journals into the mainstream, according to anthropologist Michael O’Brien, dean of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri. A recent study of word usage in popular literature by O’Brien and his colleagues documented how the usage of certain words related to climate change has risen and fallen over the past two centuries. Understanding how word usage affects public acceptance of science could lead to better science communication and a more informed public.

“Scientists can learn from this study that the general public shouldn’t be expected to understand technical terms or be convinced by journal papers written in technical jargon,” O’Brien said. “Journalists must explain scientific terms in ways people can understand and thereby ease the movement of those terms into general speech. That can be a slow process. Several words related to climate change diffused into the popular vocabulary over a 30-50 year timeline.”

O’Brien’s study found that, by 2008, several important terms in the discussion of climate change had entered popular literature from technical obscurity in the early 1900s. These terms included:

• Biodiversity – the degree of variation in life forms within a given area
• Holocene – the current era of the Earth’s history, which started at the end of the last ice age
• Paleoclimate –the prehistoric climate, often deduced from ice cores, tree rings and pollen trapped in sediments
• Phenology – the study of how climate and other environmental factors influence the timing of events in organisms’ life cycles

Not every term was adopted at the same rate or achieved the same degree of popularity. Biodiversity, for example, came into popular use quickly in only a few years in the late 80s and early 90s. Other terms, like Holocene or phenology, have taken decades and are still relatively uncommon....

A word sculpture in Potsdam, shot by Bruno Girin from London, United Kingdom, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Cultural dimensions of climate change are underestimated, overlooked and misunderstood

Terra Daily: The impact of climate change on many aspects of cultural life for people all over the world is not being sufficiently accounted for by scientists and policy-makers. University of Exeter-led research by an international team, published in Nature Climate Change, shows that cultural factors are key to making climate change real to people and to motivating their responses.

From enjoying beaches or winter sports and visiting iconic natural spaces to using traditional methods of agriculture and construction in our daily lives, the research highlights the cultural experiences that bind our communities and are under threat as a result of climate change.

The paper argues that governments' programmes for dealing with the consequences of climate change do not give enough consideration to what really matters to individuals and communities.

Culture binds people together and helps them overcome threats to their environments and livelihoods. Some are already experiencing such threats and profound changes to their lives....

From Piranesi's "Imaginary Prisons," 1761

Perception of climate change risk depends on world-view

Harvey Leifert in Environmental Research Web: The central question of science communication is: "Why do we see persistent and very intense public conflict over facts that are relevant to policy when those facts, such as those surrounding climate change, have been well established by scientific investigation?" Such a question was put to an audience of science writers by Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University, US, at the 48th annual New Horizons in Science meeting in New Haven, Connecticut, late last year.

…[One] explanation is "cultural cognition", a term that Kahan and colleagues use to describe "the tendency of people to fit their perceptions of risk and related kinds of facts to the values that bind their identities". That dynamic, he said, "is an important part of the political conflict that we see over issues that admit of scientific investigation". Studies show that when people receive new information about, for example, climate-change research, they do not update their prior beliefs but rather assess the new information in the light of those beliefs.

…The subjects' world-views were assessed, using a scale developed by anthropologist Mary Douglas. One axis measures preference for individualist versus communitarian solutions, the other measures preferences for hierarchical versus egalitarian social ordering.

Douglas concluded that people's perceptions of risk cohere with one or another set of those values, Kahan said. Subjects high in hierarchical and individualist values would believe that if climate change is a high risk, it would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities that are important to their world-view. Those ranking high on the communitarian and egalitarian scales are, in contrast, more ambivalent about commerce and industry and more amenable to the notion that climate change posed a real risk to society…

Social and cultural limits to adaptation

Megan Rowling in Reuters AlertNet: Long-established customs, traditional beliefs and behaviour dictated by gender, ethnicity, caste and age - all these can stop people getting to grips with the challenges of climate change. But this has yet to be well recognised or investigated, says a paper released this month by the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

…What tends to be ignored are the social and cultural rules that limit peoples' ability to protect themselves from weather and climate hazards, and to exploit opportunities that may arise as temperatures, sea levels and rainfall patterns change, says Lindsey Jones, the author of the ODI briefing.

"There has been a focus on the technological, economic and natural barriers to climate change adaptation. Overcoming these has been seen as the solution because they are fairly easy to identify and quantify," the think-tank researcher told AlertNet. "Social barriers are very hard to identify, and incredibly hard to quantify ... they are very context-specific."

To help understand the problem, Jones collaborated on a 12-week project looking at how caste and gender shape the way rural communities in western Nepal are dealing with a shifting climate, which is expected to have negative impacts in the impoverished, mountainous country where many depend on rain-fed farming. The study throws up some interesting findings. It shows that, even though the country's caste system was formally outlawed in the 1960s, it still dominates social behaviour and influences the way people respond to hazards like floods.

For example, in one flood-prone area, members of lower castes said they were frequently excluded from using "safe spots" identified by their communities, and ordered to find shelter in more vulnerable places. They were told to move or "you will make this place dirty".

How lower-caste Hindu women react to climate stresses is further restricted by the burden of their household duties, their lower level of education than men, their exclusion from village meetings and politics, and their duty to abide by their religious belief system….

Old man in a resthouse Bridshram in Kathmandu (Nepal), shot by Oudeschool, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Vienna museum evacuates half its collection

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: The Albertina, one of Vienna's most famous museums, said Wednesday it has so far evacuated around half of its vast collection of 950,000 art works after rain flooded its main depot last week. "We've evacuated 50 percent of our total depots," the museum's director Klaus Albrecht Schroeder told a news conference.

"But we have to remove everything because the special cardboard containers where the paintings and drawings are held are damper than they should be." While water had been found on the containers of around 120,000 pieces, "no picture has been damaged," Schroeder said.

The Albertina, which attracts around one million visitors each year, announced last week that it would evacuate its entire depot -- which houses priceless works by artists such as Duerer, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Schiele and Klimt -- to an unspecified site following flooding caused by heavy rain….

This 1917 self-portrait by Egon Schiele is part of the Albertina's collection

Culture's vulnerability to climate

Science Daily: The growing relationship between scientists and curators is the focus of a 4-day, UN-affiliated international conference in Caracas designed to promote innovative ways to stem the decay of some of humanity's greatest art and cultural treasures.

"With the world financial crisis and the advent of climate change effects, there is a state of emergency at the museums of several tropical countries: entire collections are compromised," says Alvaro Gonzalez, a researcher at the Caracas-based Institute of Advanced Studies (IDEA) and Director of Venezuela's Cultural Heritage Conservation Foundation, the host of the event.

Says Jose-Luis Ramirez, Director of the United Nations University's Programme for Biotechnology for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNU-BIOLAC), an event sponsor: "The normal concern about single artifacts is no longer paramount. Storing and protecting entire collections safely has become a priority and scientists have a key role: developing techniques and procedures that are fundamental to heritage conservation."

Many of the world's cultural treasures are creations made of organic materials such as paper, canvas, wood and leather which, in prolonged warmth and dampness, attract mold, micro-organisms and insects, causing decay and disintegration. New biotechnology techniques to be described include the use of micro-organisms to remove fungus and other problems on artwork, photos, documents, masonry and more….

Jacek Malczewski's Melancholia, 1894

Works of art shed new light on climate change

University of Portsmouth: Paintings, watercolours and prints can be used by those who manage Britain’s coastlines to look back in time and better understand the threat of rising sea levels and climate change. … In the past seawalls, groynes and breakwaters have been used to hold back the sea and such structures protect many of Britain’s coastal towns and resorts. But this often had the effect of moving the problem further along the coast.

Thanks to an inspired idea, scientists now have a new tool to better understand how to tackle the threats to Britain’s coastal populations, assets and natural resources. …Dr Robin McInnes, who runs Isle of Wight-based consultancy Coastal and Geotechnical Services, had the idea to combine his two passions, geography and a love of art, to test his theory that we could learn a lot about coastal evolution over the centuries by examining paintings, drawings, prints and engravings.

He and his fellow researchers from the University of Portsmouth examined the work of 400 artists who painted, drew or engraved coastal scenes on the Isle of Wight and the adjacent stretch of mainland coast from Hurst Spit to Selsey Bill between 1770 and 1920. They drew up a shortlist of those artists whose could be considered reliable witnesses and then developed a ranking system for those remaining. They were left with 22 artists whose works could be trusted as a fair and accurate depiction of the coastline.

Dr McInnes said: ‘Using art in this way gives us a clear picture of the scale and pace of coastal evolution as well as environmental and developmental change. It helps us understand how it has been necessary for people who live on coasts to adapt to changing conditions over the centuries; in some locations this has involved retreating to higher or more stable ground further back from the coast.’...

"The American Culture War of Fact"... another installment of the Risk and Culture Study

Here's the abstract for what sounds like a stimulating paper: Cultural Cognition refers to the disposition to conform one's beliefs about societal risks to one's preferences for how society should be organized. Based on surveys and experiments involving some 5,000 Americans, the Second National Risk and Culture Study presents empirical evidence of the effect of this dynamic in generating conflict about global warming, school shootings, domestic terrorism, nanotechnology, and the mandatory vaccination of school-age girls against HPV, among other issues.

The Study also presents evidence of risk-communication strategies that counteract cultural cognition. Because nuclear power affirms rather than threatens the identity of persons who hold individualist values, for example, proposing it as a solution to global warming makes persons who hold such values more willing to consider evidence that climate change is a serious risk. Because people tend to impute credibility to people who share their values, persons who hold hierarchical and egalitarian values are less likely to polarize when they observe people who hold their values advocating unexpected positions on the vaccination of young girls against HPV. Such techniques can help society to create a deliberative climate in which citizens converge on policies that are both instrumentally sound and expressively congenial to persons of diverse values.

"Risk of falling" sign by Torsten Henning, Wikimedia Commons

Climate change to impact beer: scientist

Globe and Mail (New Zealand): The price of beer is likely to rise in coming decades because climate change will hamper the production of a key grain needed for the brew — especially in Australia, a scientist warned Tuesday. Jim Salinger, a climate scientist at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said climate change likely will cause a decline in the production of malting barley in parts of New Zealand and Australia. Malting barley is a key ingredient of beer. “It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up,” Mr. Salinger told the Institute of Brewing and Distilling convention....

Photo by Tomazs Sienicki, Wikimedia Commons

An Indian artist responds to climate change

The Statesman (India): Renowned sand artist Mr Sudarshan Patnaik created the miniatures of popular heritage monuments like the Jagannath temple in Puri, the shore temple in Mammalapuram in Tamilnadu, and the Gateway of India in Mumbai along the sea beach here, with an aim to highlight the threat to India's cultural heritage sites along the coastline from global warming induced sea level rise.

Mr Patnaik used about seven tones of sand and took almost two days to prepare the seven feet sculpture. “The issue of global warming is close to my heart. I imagine the kind of ruin temperature rise would bring to the live of millions of people. Flood, draught, water shortage, sea surge all combined would devastate everything we have.” Mr Patnaik said. “The impact of climate change is already evident and must not be allowed to go out of control. It chills my spine to even think that Orissa will create 4 million climate victims as estimated in Greenpeace report,” he added.

Meanwhile, the environment activists’ group Greenpeace released “Blue Alert” yesterday and alerted the Indian government and people of the subcontinent to the massive humanitarian crisis the South Asian region could face if global cross two degree tipping point. “Blue Alert ~ Climate Migrants in South Asia: Estimates and Solutions”, a paper authored by Dr Sudhir Chella Rajan , professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras, and a climate expert, estimates the number of people who could be displaced from their homes at 125 million in India and Bangladesh alone.

The report warns that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow under the business-as-usual scenario as projected, leading to global temperature rise by four-five degree centigrade, the south Asian region could face a wave of migrants displaced by the impacts of climate change, including sea level rise and drought associated with shrinking water supplies and monsoon variability.

Dr Chella Rajan, the author of the report, recommended that “India should seek policy options that are proactive in terms of developing international strategies to reduce the risk of destructive climate change. “We cannot wait for the inevitable to happen and hope to adapt to it.”

Photo of the Jagannath Temple, which Patnaik has replicated in a sand sculpture to dramatize the dangers of sea level rise. Photo by Shiva-Nataraja, Wikimedia Commons

Our eroded past

Climate change presents many urgent challenges. Sorting out which one are most urgent demands careful thought, and the answers are rarely obvious and noncontroversial. We'll probably need to make sacrifices. This story from the JournalLive (UK -- Newcastle and Tyne) prompted these thoughts, since it deals with impact of climate change on various ancient sites in the northeast of England.

What does it mean to abandon the past to the consequences of our actions? There's even a question as to whether we should heed the past that much at all. Years ago, an Egyptian economist pointed out that if his government simply took the most basic efforts to identify and do a few simple protections for all the ancient sites they new about, the effort would cost many times the gross national project of Egypt. In England, the National Trust and others are considering similar issues for the Giant's Causeway, Lindisfarne Castle, and other sites exposed to intensified winds and waves.

Photo of Lindisfarne Castle by Monkeyatlarge.