When
Where
CLIMAS PI and human-environment geographer Margaret Wilder will give a talk on the "Southwest climate gap: Poverty and environmental justice in the U.S. Southwest" on Friday, February 6, from 10:30a.m. - 12:00 p.m. in Marshall 531. The talk is from a recent paper by Wilder, with Diana Liverman and Laurel Bellante.
The paper examines the “climate gap” in the Southwest, referring to an uneven distribution of climate-related risks, impacts and policies across the social and spatial landscape. The climate and poverty relationship is examined across three key indicators of climate vulnerability, focusing on connections to health, food, and energy during the period 2010-2012. It provides an overview of climate-related social vulnerability in the southwest and summarizes the results from a stakeholder workshop and in-depth interviews about climate vulnerabilities with social service providers in southern Arizona. The paper identifies significant climate vulnerability especially relating to high levels of poverty, health concerns, and increasing costs for energy, water, and food, while highlighting the ongoing community mobilization to build resilience and reduce vulnerability. Confronting a changing climate that is projected to be hotter, drier, and with the potential to reach new thresholds, the paper suggests that more research needs to be done to understand the social and spatial characteristics of climate risk and the "everyday" experience and embodiment of climate risk by low-income populations in the Southwest.
Margaret Wilder is an associate professor in the School of Geography and Development and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona (UA). She also is an associate research professor in the UA’s Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy. She holds degrees from the University of Arizona, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame.
Dr. Wilder’s research focuses on vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in the U.S.-Mexico border region and climate and poverty in the U.S. Southwest. In addition to climate studies, she studies and teaches on water and development in Mexico and Latin America and transformations in small-scale agriculture in northwest Mexico and Central America. Dr. Wilder is a principal investigator or co-PI of several projects supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Inter-American Institute of Global Change Research (IAI).
Dr. Wilder was the coordinating lead author on the U.S.-Mexico Border chapter in the Southwest Regional Climate Assessment, and she has published in prominent peer-reviewed journals including Water Alternatives (2014), Global Environmental Change (2012), Ecology and Society (2010), the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (2013, 2010), Journal of Climate (2007), World Development (2006), and Natural Resources Journal (2000). She is currently writing a book on the political ecology of water in northern Mexico and the border region.