The HERO vision revisited

This book started with the premise that to develop sustainable communities on a sustainable planet, an infrastructure should exist that enables scientists to monitor local human–environment interactions, to share and compare data, analyses, and ideas with scientists at other locales, and to participate with colleagues and stakeholders in a global network dedicated to community-level sustainability.

The book recounted the Human–Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) project's attempt to take first steps in developing such an infrastructure and the concepts and research behind that infrastructure. As such, the project did not produce – and never intended to produce – definitive research results about, for example, vulnerability or the causes and consequences of land-use and land-cover change. Consequently, this book has concentrated on conceptualizing the elements needed to make human–environment infrastructure work, and on exploring those elements by proof-of-concept testing.

This chapter summarizes HERO's efforts (and therefore the book) by revisiting a set of questions posed in Chapter 1. The most important part of the chapter is the discussion of lessons learned during the HERO team's attempts to answer those questions. The chapter concludes by trying to support the project's (and book's) claim that there is a need for HEROs.

Answers to and lessons learned from HERO's guiding questions

Chapter 1 reported two fundamental questions that were central to the HERO effort. One overarching question guided the research and addressed infrastructure development via three less-encompassing questions (Table 15.1).

Introduction

As described in preceding chapters, one of the overarching HERO research activities was to establish a set of methodological protocols for vulnerability assessments. Within the methodological research plan were two principal activities, as introduced in Chapter 8: the development and testing of a Rapid Vulnerability Assessment methodology, and the development and testing of an Vulnerability Assessment Evaluation methodology, designed to validate, or assess the accuracy, of our work. Chapter 9 summarized our efforts on the former task; this chapter presents the results of the latter task. Accordingly, at the end of this chapter, we will be in a position to posit some synthetic conclusions about vulnerability in and across the four HERO sites.

Accuracy assessments are difficult to conduct in many research domains, but they are particularly challenging in the domain of vulnerability because the multidimensional nature of this concept makes it difficult for an individual researcher to observe and measure the principal variable of interest. The multi-site context, where the number of places and researchers is larger, amplifies this challenge. Clearly, then, conducting vulnerability research in a networked environment will present particular challenges to validating the research. In this light, a methodology for validating – or what we term evaluating – our research findings is needed.

Methods and data

There are two datasets involved in the application of our Vulnerability Assessment Evaluation methodology: the reference dataset and the validation dataset.

Introduction

The cornerstone of HERO's technological research was our effort to build a HERO collaboratory, which Pike et al. describe in Chapter 3. Another area of HERO technological research attempted to link human understanding and formal systems, such as databases, analyses, and models. Ahlqvist and Yu demonstrate two ways that HERO explored this linkage in Chapter 4.

This chapter lays the conceptual foundations for the technologically focused work of Chapters 3 and 4. It concentrates on computing with knowledge structures and on knowledge sharing between participants who may not be co-located. The chapter is organized around the following five questions:

• Why is a conceptual understanding of collaborative work in general, and HERO work in particular, important, and what advantages does it offer?

• What is the nature of concepts that human–environment scientists create and use in their attempts to understand and model Earth's complex environmental systems?

• How can computational systems represent concepts? What languages and reasoning systems can facilitate concept representation and exploit its structure?

• How can a community of collaborators share conceptual understanding?

• What roles might conceptual tools play in an evolving national cyberinfrastructure for human–environment sciences?

In the end, the chapter shows that before we can begin to collaborate we must be able to answer each of the questions above. The answers to these questions enable us to develop a collaboratory infrastructure for the sharing of meaning, concepts, information, and ultimately knowledge.

Introduction

To set the stage for a vulnerability analysis, investigators must describe and understand the geographic context, including physical characteristics of the landscape and the political and socioeconomic milieu of the population (Jianchu et al. 2005). Vulnerability studies focus on a particular place, at a specific time through its three dimensions, exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity; therefore, understanding place is essential to analyzing vulnerability.

Land-use studies are essential to understanding place because they generalize human activities on the physical landscape. Essentially, land use indicates past human decisions and actions, environmental constraints, and, in some cases, gives insight into subsequent change. Like vulnerability, land use is particular to a place at a certain time, and the analysis of that land use can be used as a baseline for future change and its implications. Vulnerability and land use are linked by the concept of place and are fundamental to contemporary research on human–environment interactions.

Although the literature on land use, land-use change, and climate change is extensive, the land-use component of vulnerability is usually conceptualized as a feedback mechanism to climate change: forest cutting releases carbon dioxide, which increases atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, which increases radiative forcing, which changes climate, and which ultimately changes land cover and subsequent land use (e.g. DeFries and Bounoua 2004; Jianchu et al. 2005; Salinger et al. 2005; Watson 2005). Moreover, land use is rarely specifically identified as a component of vulnerability.

Introduction

The central Pennsylvania study region is a land of natural and human contrasts that add important dimensions to the HERO project. It has rugged hollows and hills in the western part of the region, but broad valleys and low ridges in the eastern part. It has a humid climate with warm summers and cold winters. It has rich, thick soils in the valleys, but poor, thin soils on the forested hills and ridges. It is prone to flooding, yet is also surprisingly prone to drought. It is stunningly diverse socioeconomically, with coexisting agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial economies. The Central Pennsylvania HERO investigators focused their research on the heart of central Pennsylvania, Centre County, because it possesses all of these characteristics within a relatively small area.

This chapter describes Centre County's physical and human landscapes and its vulnerability to hydroclimatic extremes, specifically floods and droughts. It focuses on the exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity of two important venues for human–environment interaction: emergency management and water supply management. The chapter starts by painting a picture of the physical and human landscapes on which these interactions between people and their environment take place.

The physical landscape

Centre County lies in the geographical center of Pennsylvania (Figure 12.1; see also Figure 8.2), covering 1108 square miles (2870 square kilometers). The county sits astride parts of two major physiographic provinces: the Appalachian Plateau to the west and the Ridge and Valley region to the east (Figure 12.1).

What are the 4004 references about? What themes about the disasters do they address? Is there a common paradigm that dominates the thinking in these 4004? What is the appropriate way to comprehend a large and disparate variety? A human construct to simplify and organise complex reality is to devise a classification. But there is the problem of correct identification of both the individual and the group to which they belong. There also are situations of incompletion, misinformation and duplication. It is difficult to decipher details from titles that read like ‘solid foundation’, ‘without a warning’ and ‘caught in a trap’. Since these are penned as features in magazines, the design of these captions no doubt catch attention, but they also pose a problem in sorting. While these titles are bold yet mysterious, the ones authored by administrators and government officials are cautious and tight-lipped.

Labels like ‘Flood Picture in States’ or ‘Notes and News’ or ‘The Koyna Earthquake’, ‘1959 October floods of Damodar river’, ‘Assam earthquake of 1950’, ‘The Bihar flood story’, ‘The Indian Earthquake’, are mind teasers. Articles in journals that promised too much were also problematic. Take for example, research units that specified that their work was on ‘cause, characteristics, impact, response and management’, ironically covered the article in six to ten pages of a journal. These, either addressed issues with extreme generality or did not sufficiently meet their claims.

Research on a diversity of natural disasters encompasses 5017 research units. There is research on storm surges to landslips, cold wave to heat wave, earthquakes to cyclones, dust storms to rain storms. A subtle difference and the experts are quick to qualify them with another name. Thus, debris slide, landslip, rock-fall, slope-failure can all be categorised under a landslide. An alteration in velocity and a cyclone transforms to a super cyclone; a change in magnitude and a moderate earthquake is labelled as an intense type; a modification in the intensity and heavy rainfall is termed as a cloudburst.

Some researchers use the geographical setting as a characteristic of the natural disasters. Thus, coastal disasters are considered different from those in the mountains. In certain units, the element of nature dictates the choice of some of the research units. There are water related, weather associated or geomorphology associated disasters. There are still other ways to sort the natural disasters among the 5017 research units.

There are researchers who have worked on the slow type of disasters like a drought, cold wave or heat wave while many others have worked on sudden and quick types like earthquakes, cyclones and tsunami. Using the feel of a natural disaster they could be grouped into the shaky, windy and the wet kind. Earthquake, cyclone and heavy rain respectively would fall into these three different types.

The study of disasters runs parallel to the study of Indian society, economy, polity, music, paintings and sculpture. One need not go too far to seek the reason. As part and parcel of the planetary process, earthquakes, floods, droughts, and cyclones or for that matter, cold and heat waves are neither alien nor recent entrants to India. Arriving suddenly or building steadily, natural disasters have continued to take a toll on life in India since eons. Even though they are perceived as natural events, the fact that they are not viewed as ‘normal’ implies that they cannot be overlooked. The result is that references to natural disasters are interpolated into travel accounts, chronicles, and administrative reports and inscribed in edicts or weaved within legends. Strewn across this ‘literature’ is the source of the study of natural disasters in India. Be it an account, description or even a story, these involve research, imagination and thought. There is little doubt that if such sources were amassed from every language, class and creed of India, the wealth would enrich our understanding of the study of natural disasters.

While the retrieval, translation and analysis of these materials is a project worth a lifetime, yet its scope unfortunately falls out of the compass of this book. This is because in all such references, the description of disasters is embedded within larger texts and is incidental to the context.