Date/Time
Date(s) - 13/04/2015
15:00 - 16:00
Location
ICCCAD Conference Room
Categories
The next instalment of the ICCCAD Seminar Series will be taking place on Monday, Aprl 12. Casey Williams will be speaking in a seminar titled ‘Knowledge and Adaptive Capacity’.
About the seminar:
The seminar will explore the relationship between knowledge and adaptive capacity – the ability to prepare for and respond to climate variability and change. It will address theoretical issues related to defining, assessing, and determining the usefulness of climate change knowledge – raising broad questions like “What is knowledge?” “What kinds of information count as legitimate or useful climate change knowledge?” and “How do we determine what people know?”
The seminar will also present preliminary findings from a pilot study on this topic conducted in Bangladesh and India. The study was designed to determine whether and to what extent a person’s knowledge of climate change influences his or her self-reported ability to take action to address climate change. The findings suggest that having a basic understanding of climate change improves a person’s ability to act in response to its effects. The findings also suggest that increased knowledge improves a person’s sense of self-efficacy, and that sharing information with others might be particularly powerful in improving adaptive capacity.
About the speaker:
Casey Williams is a Hart Fellow at Duke University and a Visiting Researcher at the International Centre for Climate Change. He has spent the last ten months in Bangladesh working on both desk- and field-based research projects related to role “knowledge” plays in improving peoples’ ability to adapt to the effects of climate change.
