Jenn Brousseau: Improving adaptation planning by evaluating climate workshops

The following story was written in December 2021 by Hannah Ballowe in ENGL 4824: Science Writing as part of a collaboration between the English department and the Center for Communicating Science.

Jenn Brousseau has tackled climate and environmental research while studying primates and dragonflies in Indonesia. Now, she approaches climate research by studying humans remotely from Blacksburg, Virginia.

    "I’m a social scientist,” Jenn Brousseau says. And she is a social scientist. But she is also much more than that.

    She is an animal lover and climate activist. She has published research on orangutan behavior. She has studied dragonflies and helped develop educational programs for the Borneo Nature Foundation. She has lived and worked in the remote tropical forests of Indonesia.

    Now, as a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech, Brousseau is seeking to answer the question: How are places around the United States preparing to deal with climate change, and what can positively or negatively impact the willingness of humans and communities to take action?

    Brousseau’s path to Virginia Tech’s Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation began during her childhood in Rhode Island, where trips to the zoo sparked an early love for animals. She received an undergraduate degree in behavioral biology from Boston University before heading to Indonesia to work with Dr. Cheryl Knott, a Boston University professor.

    In her first two years in Indonesia, Brousseau studied primate behavior, using her undergraduate focus on animal behavior. She then received a master’s degree in conservation project management from the University of Kent before returning to Indonesia to work with the Borneo Nature Foundation.

    Her time in Indonesia led her to a dragonfly research project where she met her now-boyfriend, and, eventually, to environmental education, where she found her true calling.

    “As much as I love animals,” she says, “I think you also need to work with people and that side of environmentalism and conservation to actually protect their [animals’] habitats.”

    Working in environmental education sparked an interest in how such education can influence environmental awareness and action, which led her back to academia to study with Dr. Marc Stern at Virginia Tech.

    Brousseau works with Stern and fellow Ph.D. student Caleb O’Brien as they study how eight communities across the United States adapt to climate change in the context of climate adaptation workshops. Brousseau, O’Brien, and Stern conduct interviews and collect data before and after these two-day virtual workshops. Because their work focuses on groups across the United States, their studies must be adaptable. 

    “Climate change is going to impact communities all over the United States very differently,” Brousseau says, “from a coastal community to something in the mountains.”

    Luckily for Brousseau, adaptation is something that she has experienced. Her transition to Virginia Tech not only presented social and environmental changes from the forests of Indonesia to the mountains of Blacksburg, but also required her research skills to transition from quantitative data collection on primate behavior to qualitative data collection through methods like interviews and surveys.

    “My brain still goes to a really quantitative place,” she says. “I want to have all the data, be able to run statistics, and say that this independent variable influenced this dependent variable. All the work I do now is just not like that. It sometimes feels abstract still, like ‘How am I going to know how communities adapt to climate change and what's driving that? There's so many things it could be…’ That's the beauty of qualitative case studies and comparing amongst different communities.”

    Brousseau most enjoys conducting interviews, which take place with participants up to two years after they attend the climate adaptation workshops. These interviews allow Brousseau to meet new people, hear their stories, and learn about why they care about climate change.

    Within her research group, Brousseau’s work centers around how communities and organizations work together. She uses surveys to create social network maps that represent these interactions and show relationships among different groups involved in climate change responses. The surveys allow participants to select organizations they have worked with before and include questions regarding the quality of these interactions. Do participants trust or feel they share similar goals with the organizations? Does this affect their ability to work together?

    While Brousseau’s work focuses on eight specific communities, the application of her research extends beyond that. Through her studies, Brousseau hopes to determine what factors drive or limit climate change adaptation to provide future guidance to communities managing climate change.

    Brousseau strives for applicable research that will benefit communities and show them how they’re addressing climate change. She hopes to tell a story that can be accessed by everyone and plans to publish open-access research in the future. She might even dabble in the world of podcasts.

    “I’d love to do a podcast,” she says. “I think it’s a great way to get your research out there.”

    After she finishes her Ph.D., Brousseau plans to remain in academia as a professor. Her diverse research background allows her to teach anything from social science theory to species behavior; the only question is how she can combine her many passions into one class.

    For more information on Brousseau, check out her blog, and be sure to keep her research in mind whether you’re passionate about climate change, interested in social behaviors, or just like keeping up with new scientific research.