Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education

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The Board on Environmental Change and Society (BECS) will continue and expand the work of the Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change (CHDGC), which since 1989 has been providing advice and fostering research on global environmental change from the perspective of the social sciences.

Major transitions are on the horizon for the human relationship to the global environment. Human societies are themselves being transformed by demographic, economic, technological, institutional, and cultural changes. These shifts are interacting with, and in some cases accelerating, alterations in environmental conditions that have been documented at local, regional, national, continental and global scales. The goal of BECS is to advance the use of fundamental science to understand coupled human-environment systems, and to inform transitions needed to maintain human well-being in the face of changing climate, environment, and natural resources.

BECS will contribute insights that, when integrated with findings from the physical and biological sciences, engineering, health, and other fields, will help society anticipate vulnerabilities and damaging exposures, inform efforts to engineer transitions with an understanding of their likely intended and unintended consequences, and provide options for coping with impacts and dislocations that may now be unavoidable. In carrying out its mission to synthesize, assess, and foster research, BECS will work closely with other Boards and Committees of the National Research Council, and with international partners, to bring to bear on the needs of sponsoring agencies and institutions the best that science has to offer.

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CONTACT Board on Environmental Change and Society (click to email) 500 Fifth Street, N.W., Keck 1126 Washington, DC 20001 202.334-1864 202.334-3829 (fax)

Last updated: February 28, 2012