Create Social Responses to a Changing Environment

The unprecedented environmental challenges facing contemporary societies pose profound risks to human well-being, particularly for marginalized communities. Climate change, escalating urbanization, and environmental degradation threaten health, undermine coping, and deepen existing inequities. As of 2015, 375 million people per year are likely affected by climate-related disasters; over 25 million have migrated due to environmental change. One third of the world’s urban population lives in environmentally marginal locations. Social interventions – to strengthen community resilience, adaptive capacity, and assets, build sustainable socio-ecological systems, and reduce sociospatial inequities – are key to supporting individual and collective well-being in increasingly turbulent environments. Social work brings to these efforts deep expertise in the science and practice of people-in-context and a robust, multi-level portfolio of tested interventions. Priority areas for social work leadership include community-engaged organizing and development, disaster preparedness and response, population dislocation, and mitigation of environmental inequities. Yet creating effective social responses to environmental changes will also require significant innovation: new and unusual partnerships, reimagined systems and social relationships, broadened technologies and data sources, and creative development and application of evidence-based policies and practices. This poster details the key elements of this Grand Challenge and invites broad-based research and practice involvement.