Risk perception in provision of aquatic ecosystem services.

This project was funded through NSF’s Social-Environment Synthesis Center (SESYNC). It brought together over 20 experts from diverse fields to improve our understanding of governance responses to harmful microbial blooms in Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. Dr. Webster and her co-PI Semra Aytur led the team through 4 workshops, helping to develop a shared understanding of governance efforts in these two social-ecological systems. Resulting publications included Webster and Pavlovich (2019). This project also fostered lasting connections among team-members, many of whom contributed to papers that applied the concepts developed during these workshops to other topics, like pandemics.

Corporate Social Responsibility in the Oil Industry

Many companies and countries have turned to corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs to minimize risk, build brand value, and reduce conflict with local communities. However, like most forms of environmental governance, the effectiveness of CSR depends on how well it is implemented, particularly whether or not corporations are willing to make changes to their operations that protect the environment and empower local communities. In this project, we collected data on the problem narratives that oil companies use when describing their CSR efforts, their actual environmental impact, and various metrics of social responsibility. The first result of these effort is a paper on the failure of Shell’s attempts at CSR in Nigeria, which was published with co-author Alero Akporiaye.

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Consumer Choice and Sustainability (CCS)

Consumer Choice and Sustainability (CCS) focuses on economic responses to problem signals (or lack thereof) at the consumer level.  Theoretically, win-win approaches such as green entrepreneurship have the potential to bridge the gap between growth and sustainability, if consumers are willing and able to purchase “green” products. However, there are many social and psychological factors that prevent uptake of green consumer behaviors, not just buying green, but buying (and wasting) less. This project helps us to better understand the impacts of individual-level consumer decision processes on the total consumption and disposal of various types of goods using agent based modeling technology. Results from this project can be found in Roozmand and Webster (2014).

Fishscape

Fishscape is a fully-coupled computational model of the fishery for tropical tunas in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. It will allow us to explore key interactions between oceanographic conditions, biological factors, fisher behavior, economic systems, and international policy. The current version of the model is implemented in the EASy GIS system and uses ABM for both fish and fisher behavior.