Selected Research Findings: Environment and Behavior Program

• The nation's efforts to curb the rising costs of natural disasters have failed because they have been too narrowly concentrated on simple loss reduction. Research findings argue that in order to achieve disaster resiliency, such efforts must also be targeted toward other aspects of a sustainable society-including economic vitality, environmental quality, and intergenerational equity.

• When water transfers take place within a buoyant economic region, the effect is to support new growth and new economic activity; when water transfers are from a depressed agricultural region to other economic areas, the effects typically include long-term unemployment of human resources, the imposition of significant privately borne costs of readjustment, depression of the tax base with consequent reduction of social services, and social and cultural disruption.

• The impacts of water transfers out of agricultural communities become increasingly severe as cumulative transfers take place. The least valuable irrigated crops are usually phased out first, followed by more valuable crops, and finally the crops that are inputs to high value-added industries like food processing and feedlots.

• When water transfers take place within prosperous regions, water markets tend to operate the way economic theory would predict for efficient markets: many small transactions taking place on a time-wise continuous basis. When the transfers are from depressed agricultural areas, the transfers tend to be large and sporadic with heavy impacts on the local economy.

• Efforts to head off damage from natural hazards-such as levees designed to confine flood water-are ineffective in the long term. Such efforts merely transfer damages to future generations.

• Most disaster relief programs focus on returning victims to their pre-disaster status rather than on the opportunities to promote safer reconstruction.

• Among the Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the traditional system of managing natural resources based on a spiritual respect for all living things is being undermined by the need to earn money from the leasing of the land to outside interests for the raising of cattle.

• The criteria of economic efficiency and equity are frequently negatively related, so that economically efficient patterns of development result in inequitable distribution of the benefits of development. Ignoring equity in the design and execution of development programs and projects frequently backfires through social disruption that interferes with the planned operation of projects. Many water projects in Africa and in Mexico have suffered this fate.

• Enset cultivation in southern Ethiopia has remained sustainable for centuries due to the tight articulation of the livestock production system with the agricultural system. This system is now experiencing stress due to the loss of grazing lands as common lands are put under cultivation to meet the short term needs of a rapidly increasing human population.

• Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania are rapidly diversifying their livestock-based economy, especially through the adoption of cultivation. The nutritional status of malnourished children improved dramatically following the adoption of cultivation, and the overall economy was significantly strengthened by reducing the need for pastoralists to sell livestock for the purchase of grain.

• Pastoral mobility patterns in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in northern Tanzania have been altered dramatically in response to the five-fold increase in the wildebeest population. The most important impact of the increase in the wildebeest population was the loss of grazing during the wet season as people and livestock are forced to leave the plains during the time that the wildebeest are calving.

• Traditional wildlife management by Alaska Natives achieved sustainable harvests and was the core of many cultural values, but research has demonstrated that legal and institutional structures imposed by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act are incompatible with traditional culture. Imposition of incompatible management regimes on indigenous peoples is a world-wide threat to cultural survival.