Two New Papers on Adaptation

Anne Pisor and I organized a special issue of the American Journal of Human Biology from papers from our 2020 Wiley  Symposium at AAPAs, "Human Responses to Climate Change: What Anthropologists Want Climate Scientists and Policymakers to Know." Alas, the 2020 AAPAs were canceled because of COVID-19, but we kept going with the special issue. This has been coming together over the last month or so as papers get revised and published. Early View makes special issues a little awkward (e.g., our intro to the special issue has been published before many of the papers!), but it's nice to have the papers published as soon as they're accepted.

The first of these papers is the published version of the preprint, written with Anne and Elspeth Ready, I described previously. The paper is half review of the concept of adaptation and half meditation on the ways that evolutionary theory could be used to improve our understanding of climate-change adaptation. I wrote a long Twitter thread about it yesterday. The published version of the paper is available at AJHB.

The second paper is the introduction to the special issue, written again with Anne, where we lay out our vision of adaptation and how anthropology can help us understand specifically adaptations to climate change. 

Because we think this is such an important issue, we plan to try to hold our symposium again in 2021. Wisely, AAPA has made contingency plans to make the conference more or less virtual, as pandemic conditions permit, so we should actually be able to pull it off this time around.