Overview
Title: Human Behavior Models for Climate Change and Disease Dynamics
Abstract:
The vast majority of climate models designed to project future global temperature trajectories ignore feedbacks between human behavioral and social system responses and the climate system. A working group of diverse researchers with backgrounds in mathematical modeling, climate science, psychology, sociology, economics, geography and ecology has linked climate models to human behavior, providing evidence that these linkages can significantly modify future trajectories compared to climate models based only on natural system processes. Climate models make assumptions about reductions in future greenhouse gas emissions and project the implications, but they do this with no rational basis for human responses. I will discuss our research including (i) a model from the theory of planned behavior in social psychology, linked to extreme events obtained from a climate model, and feedback to global emissions; (ii) models for personal experience and memory processing as a balance between sensing and forgetting extreme climate events that allows for habituation, salience, biased assimilation and recency; and (iii) models for opinion dynamics arising from interactions among cultural, socio-political, psychological, and institutional factors to shape public support or opposition for climate mitigation policy. These approaches are now being modified to incorporate aspects of risk perception and behavior in infectious disease dynamics.
Bio: Louis J. Gross is a Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He was the Founding Director of the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), a NSF-funded center to foster research and education at the interface between math and biology. He is Director Emeritus of The Institute for Environmental Modeling which provides an accessible collection of calculators to assist in human and ecological risk assessment for toxicants and radionuclides. He was co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology and co-author of the textbook Mathematics for the Life Sciences. He has served as Program Chair of the Ecological Society of America, as President of the Society for Mathematical Biology, President of the UTK Faculty Senate, Treasurer for the American Institute of Biological Sciences and as Chair of the National Research Council Committee on Education in Biocomplexity Research. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America and of the Society for Mathematical Biology. He is a long-time volunteer for Jubilee Community Arts, hosted and produced folk music programs for WUOT-FM, performs with the Lark in the Morn English Country Dancers and serves as House Sound Engineer for concerts at the Laurel Theatre in Knoxville.