Mining and Agriculture

Description
Any policy will occur in a landscape of multiple stakeholders, potentially with divergent goals. Thus, while science might suggest policies, unintended feedbacks from social actors can derail good management. Yet, such feedbacks rarely enter our predictive models.
We will begin to build a framework to include social feedbacks into our models, using scenario analyses and databases collated under the UNESCO Chair. To begin, we choose two competing activities: agriculture and mining in Panama, which recently saw country wide protests, shutting down the country and a Supreme Court ruling against mining, and will model interactions with economics, local community livelihoods and environments. This will expand the conceptual basis of PRISM and provide a blueprint to consider social feedbacks and unintended consequences.

PRISM project leader: Jade Aitken

Publications: To follow