In a period of rapid global environmental change how do complex systems of human social organizations and individuals in urban areas create, grow, learn, and change in reaction to threats of climate change, local air pollution, and other environmental problems? What is the influence of scientific information and environmental awareness on the general public, on public agencies and their programs, and within those agencies themselves? What are the human social dynamics that occur and can these be characterized by theories of innovation and social learning that have been so successful in explaining economic performance? Periods of rapid change place a premium on the ability to acquire, absorb and react to relevant knowledge and information by the public institutions responsible for human health and welfare, and, in this research instance, for ensuring environmental quality. We will apply the insights and theories gained in institutional economics about economic innovation and social learning in the face of rapid economic and technological change in conditions of high uncertainty, to adaptation and change in human behavior in the public sector in the face of potentially grave environmental problems. This research will couple state of the art research in quantifying the effects of land surface vegetation on local climate, ecosystem services valuation and social learning methods to understand individual and organizational action under the impetus of internal and external stimuli. We will use a variety of techniques including Bayesian modeling to describe the dynamics of behavior, and real time program development and implementation that result from our input into a large scale natural experiment of a city attempting to mitigate its own pollution through the deployment of an urban forest in Los Angeles, California.
This proposal's scholarly contribution includes advancing integrative research efforts spanning the different science, engineering and social science communities. Our work seeks to better understand the dynamics of change in human social organizations through the application of coupled biophysical and social science approaches. We apply new insights about how organizations learn from institutional economics to a public policy setting.
The research methods will include using economic tools to quantify the value of the urban forest through housing prices, and several social science methods to understand how governmental organizations learn and change, including developing baselines of existing rules and procedures and observing if these change in response to new information about the economic and environmental value of trees in the urban environment. To measure the environmental impacts of trees in the urban environment, we will deploy thermal sap flow sensors in tree trunks to understand tree transpiration and its effects on the local climate. We will assess the impacts of urban tree transpiration on local energy partitioning with measurements of net radiation, temperature and relative humidity profiles, and soil heat flux to estimate the Bowen ratio (the ratio of sensible to latent heat flux) in varying locations. These measurements will be compared to tree transpiration estimates scaled from sap flow measurements. Finally, we will also develop a land-surface-atmosphere model to simulate the coupled and interactive impact of urban forests in the Los Angeles Basin on the local climate
The broader impacts of this research should contribute to understanding the dynamics of human action and development and the institutional obstacles and barriers to societies using scientific information. Our research examines how complex public and non-profit organizations evolve in response to information: their social learning and capacity for change; the ensuing human social dynamics that occur as a result of new information. This research should also assist in understanding the potential impacts on environmental quality of urban afforestation programs, particularly in Mediterranean climates. In a period of serious climate change and environmental degradation caused by cities, our research will contribute to understanding the extent and potential of remediation strategies at the city-level.
