CECI-sponsored Research: Part II

June 19, 2009

Last fall, the Climate and Environmental Change Initiative provided seed funding for a number of exciting interdisciplinary climate research projects taking place at Rutgers. The funding for these grants came from an Academic Excellence Fund award from the university. In the second half of this two-part series, we are highlighting projects taking place in different regions of the United States and around the world.

Experts and their publics: an exploration of policy-relevant science
Principal Investigator: Lee Clarke (Department of Sociology)
Dr. Lee Clarke is investigating the process by which scientists decide their research is relevant to the general public. How do these scientific Paul Revere's take their information public? How do they choose to warn people outside of their research communities? Clarke and his colleagues have interviewed over 60 wetlands scientists from the New Orleans region whose work in some way "foretold" what would happen in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after a large storm. His work provides insight into the role that scientists play in sounding alarm bells on behalf of their communities.

Economic Vulnerability under a New Climate Regime
Principal Investigator: Robin Leichenko (Department of Geography)
Dr. Robin Leichenko is investigating the ways in which climate change creates new vulnerabilities for households, communities, and businesses. In the wake of an increasing number of extreme coastal storms, insurance companies have been abandoning coastal zones. Using coastal Florida and the NYC metropolitan region as case studies, Leichenko and her colleagues are examining how the spatial patterns of insurance coverage for households and businesses have changed over time. Decreases in the availability and increases in the cost of insurance have potentially devastating financial impacts on the fabric of our coastlines.

Dating the hunter-gatherer/pastoralist transition and Holocene climate change, Lake Turkana, northern Kenya
Principal Investigator: Gail M. Ashley (Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences)
Dr. Gail Ashley and her colleagues are reconstructing the paleoclimatic and paleo-environmental framework of Lake Turkana, which is located on the Kenya-Ethiopia border in the East African Rift Valley. Between 9000 and 4000 years ago, the settlers of this region changed their subsistence practices from primarily hunting and gathering to fishing and then to pastoralism. Dr. Ashley's work has linked the changes in subsistence practices observed in the archeological record to a gradual increase in aridity, demonstrating the relationship between human development and climate.

Regional Scale Climate Change Prediction and its Meaning for Social-Institutional Adaptation in Rajasthan, India
Principal Investigator: Trevor Birkenholtz (Department of Geography)
Trevor Birkenholtz recently spent three weeks in Rajasthan, India conducting research into groundwater irrigating farmers' adaptation strategies to climate related ecological change such as shifts in cropping seasons, changes in intensity and periodicity of rainfall events, and reductions in groundwater recharge. In doing so he identified the ways in which farmers access monsoon rainfall predictions and how access to better rainfall and temperature scenarios might impact farmers' cropping decisions within a dynamic and rapidly changing political economic context that presents multiple stressors and unknowns (i.e. market uncertainty and sharp divisions along caste and class).

Developing new tracers for reconstructing past patterns of ocean circulation
Principal Investigator: Yair Rosenthal (Department of Earth and Planetiary Sciences and Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences)
Dr. Allison Franzese has been working with Drs. Yair Rosenthal and Mark Feignson to develop the analytical capability to analyze neodymium (Nd) isotopes in foraminifera for paleoceanographic reconstructions. The preliminary results show that interspecies offsets occur in some locations but not others, probably because of different water column structures. Based on their previous work and the preliminary results obtained via the CECI mini-grant, this team has submitted an NSF proposal entitled “Foraminifera as a proxy for seawater neodymium: Core-top calibration and down-core application for reconstructing Holocene variability in the Indonesian Throughflow (ITF) which has been recommended for funding.