NSF funds Jones to study climate change perceptions among primary producers

Repost from Campus Weekly

Dr. Eric Jones (Anthropology) was awarded a one-year National Science Foundation grant titled “Collaborative Research: Cultural Models of Nature Across Cultures: Space, Causality, and Primary Food Producers” for investigating Quichua-speaking agriculturalists’ perceptions of climate change in northern Ecuador. He teamed up with 14 other principal investigators from around the world to do a comparative study of how primary producers’ understand change in their biophysical environments through their specific production activities. He hopes that policy makers engaged in solving problems caused by climate change will find this novel aspect of local/indigenous knowledge very useful. Jones has been a research scientist in UNCG Anthropology since 2006. Additionally, Jones was awarded a nine-month grant for “Women as agents of change: Understanding impacts and opportunities of their entrepreneurship in the cookstove value chain in the Andean region” by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves – an initiative of the United Nations Foundation. He is PI on this non-UNCG-sponsored project through CEDESOL, a solar cookstove organization in Colombia.