Changing Climate, Changing Worlds / Ethnobiology (PDF)

Meredith Welch-Devine is Director of Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs at the UGA Graduate School and an adjunct faculty member in the department of Anthropology. Dr. Welch-Devine's primary research interests include climate change perceptions and adaptation, impacts of sea level rise and extreme weather events on coastal populations, collective management of common-pool resources, and policy and practice related to conservation and sustainability. Her dissertation research - set in the Basque region of France - centered on the implementation of the European Union's Habitats Directive in an agricultural area with a strong common property regime. This directive created a pan-European network of conservation sites, called Natura 2000, and was the subject of intense resistance by the local population. Since that time, she has continued to collaborate with Basque farmers on research related to sustainable agriculture. Closer to home, she has been associated with the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research program since 2003, where she has sought to understand how people observe and make sense of changes in their environment, including climate change. Most recently, she has worked on the Georgia coast to understand how people view their adaptation options, including migration away from the coast, in the face of increasing storm severity. This work also provides a starting point for a collaboration with faculty in history and in design that will use augmented and virtual realities to explore environmental pasts, presents, and futures with research participants.







Anne Sourdril is a social anthropologist, research fellow at the CNRS and member of the Laboratoire Dynamiques Sociales et Recomposition des Espaces (UMR 7533 Ladyss). Her researches focus on the dynamics of socio-ecological systems in the context of long-term environmental change. She is working on the processes of spatial greening, the multiplication of measures to protect