The Challenges of Fieldwork for LGBTQ+ Geoscientists

A new survey reveals the unique issues that traveling for research poses for LGBTQ+ scientists. The data should help us create solutions that foster safety and inclusion.

Credit: iStock/helovi

By Alison N. Olcott and Matthew R. Downen  28 August 2020

Fieldwork is often framed as central to geoscience research. What fieldwork comprises varies across geoscience disciplines and can encompass everything from wilderness treks, oceanographic cruises, and class field trips to museum and laboratory visits, trips to research centers, and attending conferences around the world. What varies just as widely, unfortunately, is how safe field research and work-related travel are to the geoscientists who must perform it.

There has not been a deliberate focus on challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community in the geosciences with respect to fieldwork.

There is increasing awareness of the hazards of sexual harassment and assault in the field-based sciences and a growing understanding that fieldwork is not always accessible for geoscientists with varying physical abilities or young families. However, there has not been a deliberate focus on challenges faced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community in the geosciences with respect to fieldwork.

This is not to say that interventions for other discrete groups cannot help members of the LGBTQ+ community. People are complex, and their identities intersect many realms—there are, of course, LGBTQ+ geoscientists with disabilities and those with young children. However, it is often assumed that interventions intended to help one minoritized group will help all such groups—“a rising tide lifts all boats” approach. For instance, in the seminal study on harassment in the field [Clancy et al., 2014], the authors noted that “our results cannot adequately speak to the experiences of people of color or [LGBTQ+] individuals because they are under-represented in our fields and therefore our dataset, but the experiences reported by our respondents are likely reflective of a broader climate for members of various minority groups.”

But without data, this widely held assumption cannot be assessed. One of the biggest barriers to supporting the LGBTQ+ geoscientist community is that to date, there have not been many systematic attempts to describe and understand this community. Individual geologists have shared their stories in places like 500 Queer Scientists or in the media, which is a crucial way of increasing visibility, but storytelling does not help assess the needs and challenges of the community as a whole.

This lack of information is not limited to the geosciences. Every 2 years the National Science Foundation publishes reports on the state of “women, minorities and persons with disabilities” in science and engineering but has not yet collected information on LGBTQ+ scientists. There have been some efforts to collect data about LGBTQ+ scientists in physics and chemistry, as well as across all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. One 2016 study surveyed 1,603 LGBTQA STEM professionals, including 108 geoscientists, although the data were only published in aggregate [Yoder and Mattheis, 2016].

First, Quantify the Community

To better understand the needs and struggles of LGBTQ+ geoscientists, we launched a survey in fall 2019.

To better understand the needs and struggles of LGBTQ+ geoscientists, we launched a survey in fall 2019 that grew out of one author’s (M.R.D.) attempt earlier that year to connect with his own community. As part of a presentation to an on-campus branch of the organization Out in STEM, he tweeted an informal survey trying to understand the concerns of other LGBTQ+ paleontologists. The results revealed that many of these scientists felt unseen, unheard, and unsupported in their field. The responses to the informal survey prompted us to conduct an official survey of geoscientists, modeling ours on that of Yoder and Mattheis [2016]. Once we were granted permission from the human subjects board at our university, we conducted the survey online, as studies have shown that this is the best way to collect information related to identity [McInroy, 2016].

On the basis of 261 responses, we found that the geosciences contain a diverse LGBTQ+ community. Most participants identified as cisgender women (47%) or as transgender (an umbrella term that includes transgender man, transgender woman, nonbinary, genderqueer/genderfluid, agender, and other identifiers for people whose gender does not strictly match the gender they were assigned at birth; 31%), with 22% identifying as cisgender men. Diverse sexualities are also represented, dominated by bisexual/pansexual/queer identities (52%), followed by gay/lesbian identities (34%), and then asexual/demisexual/romantic-spectrum identities (14%).

These results also revealed that the composition of the LGBTQ+ community in the geosciences is different from what has been found in STEM in aggregate, as well as in physics in the United States and the United Kingdom. By comparison, there are fewer gay men and a higher proportion of women and nonbinary/genderqueer and bisexual people in the geosciences. The racial demographics of LGBTQ+ participants in our survey were similar to those of the geosciences as a whole, as 83% of the respondents were white, 8% were Asian, and 7% were Hispanic/Latinx, while the remaining 3% were Black, Native American, or Pacific Islander.

Then Quantify the Problem

Although the survey asked about many experiences in the geosciences track, we were particularly struck by the data we collected on fieldwork and remote research. When asked about experiences with fieldwork or remote research, almost 55% of respondents indicated that they had been in an area where they did not feel safe because of their identity, expression, or presentation. Furthermore, about a third of the respondents indicated that they have refused to do fieldwork because of concerns for personal safety related to their identity. The need for these concerns becomes clear when looking at a world map highlighting where LGBTQ+ identities are not protected or are even criminalized (Figure 1). Even in places where these identities are not categorized as unlawful, the dominant culture may not be LGBTQ+ friendly.

Fig. 1. This map shows areas in the world where LGBTQ+ status is criminalized (red) or not legally protected (yellow), as well as countries in which residents do not believe the country is a hospitable place for LGBTQ+ people. (Individuals in Antarctica are each covered by the laws of their own country.) Credit: Alison N. Olcott

These findings are striking, both in their scale and in how widespread they are. For instance, Clancy et al. [2017] conducted a methodologically similar study of astronomers and planetary scientists identifying those likely to feel unsafe in their workplaces because of gender (women, 35%; men, 1%) and race (women of color, 28%; men of color, 1.5%; white men and women, <1%). Our data show that a majority of individuals in all demographic groups identified by Clancy et al. who also identify as LGBTQ+ have felt unsafe with fieldwork or remote research experiences, and 34% refuse to do fieldwork over fears related to their identity. In fact, 62% of cisgender white men reported feeling unsafe in the field due to their LGBTQ+ identity; the only group that reported feeling more unsafe was cisgender women of color (75%). Cisgender women of all races and transgender people of color reported the highest rates of refusing to do fieldwork because of safety issues (50% and 46%, respectively).

Support Is Lacking for Graduate Students

Another troubling finding of our survey is that LGBTQ+ graduate students (29%) are significantly less likely than professors (57%) to have opted out of fieldwork in a specific locality because of safety fears. This is not surprising given the power imbalances present in graduate programs; a graduate student’s research is often done in consultation with faculty advisers as part of a larger research agenda, which means that relative to faculty, students typically have far less control over their field site selection.

This power imbalance speaks to the need for graduate programs to develop adequate support and mentorship for LGBTQ+ graduate students, a need that is echoed in the survey responses. Most respondents (87%) reported that increased LGBTQ+ mentorship would have been helpful during their time as a student. Responses indicated that faculty support for the LGBTQ+ community was low both inside and outside the classroom, with 85% and 69% of respondents, respectively, reporting rarely or never experiencing such support. These two metrics are correlated: A student who experiences in-class support is likely also to have experienced out-of-class support.

Compounding the lack of available support, the overwhelming majority (85%) of respondents felt that other LGBTQ+ people in geology were not visible during their time as a student, presenting a challenge to them to even seek out and solicit mentorship. An even greater majority (91%) expressed that greater visibility and representation of LGBTQ+ people in geology would have been helpful during their time as a student, both in the field and at their home institution.

Using Data to Support LGBTQ+ Geoscientists

It’s clear that existing interventions to make the geosciences more inclusive are not sufficient for LGBTQ+ geoscientists.

Given that almost all respondents wished for visible representation and that individuals in all demographic groups have felt unsafe doing fieldwork or remote research, it’s clear that existing interventions to make the geosciences more inclusive are not sufficient for LGBTQ+ geoscientists. These findings are key for developing solutions for challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ geoscientist community.

Advisers, employers, and institutions need to be aware of safety issues associated with fieldwork and to educate themselves about potential dangers to LGBTQ+ geoscientists at field sites. However, the need for support and mentorship goes beyond the field [Mulcahy et al., 2016]. In the classroom, support for LGBTQ+ students starts with professors confronting homophobia, using inclusive language, and using students’ preferred pronouns. Out of the classroom, faculty and staff can engage in supportive academic advising, visible allyship, and diversity training. Such gestures may seem small but are, in fact, tremendously meaningful. LGBTQ+ students report that a crucial part of their overall success is having a mentor to whom they are comfortable disclosing their identity.

Over the past few years, the geosciences community has been trying to broaden participation by making fieldwork and conferences more accessible and welcoming. Our survey makes clear that we need to reach out further to explicitly support the LGBTQ+ community. An important place to start is with education and awareness that allow our LGBTQ+ colleagues to be safe and feel supported in the field.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Patrick Getty, T. K. Morton, Khye Blue, and Colleen Wynn for feedback on the initial survey and A. Bradley for providing additional data. We received approval from the Human Research Protection Program at the University of Kansas (IRB ID: STUDY00144586) for human subject testing for the survey.

References

Clancy, K. B. H., et al. (2014), Survey of academic field experiences (SAFE): Trainees report harassment and assault, PloS One, 9(7), e102172, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172.

Clancy, K. B. H., et al. (2017), Double jeopardy in astronomy and planetary science: Women of color face greater risks of gendered and racial harassment, J. Geophys. Res. Planets, 122(7), 1,610–1,623, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JE005256.

McInroy, L. B. (2016), Pitfalls, potentials, and ethics of online survey research: LGBTQ and other marginalized and hard-to-access youths, Social Work Res., 40(2), 83–94, https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/svw005.

Mulcahy, M., et al. (2016), Informal mentoring for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, J. Educ. Res., 109(4), 405–412, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.979907.

Yoder, J. B., and A. Mattheis (2016), Queer in STEM: Workplace experiences reported in a national survey of LGBTQA individuals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers, J. Homosexuality, 63(1), 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2015.1078632.

Author Information

Alison N. Olcott (olcott@ku.edu) and Matthew R. Downen, University of Kansas, Lawrence

Citation: Olcott, A. N., and M. R. Downen (2020), The challenges of fieldwork for LGBTQ+ geoscientists, Eos, 101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EO148200. Published on 28 August 2020.

Text © 2020. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

 

Record Locust Swarms Hint at What’s to Come with Climate Change

Warming oceans that feed cyclones have also bred record-breaking swarms of desert locusts. Such plagues could grow bigger and more widespread with climate change.

The locust attacks of 2019–2020 are the worst of the past 30 years. Credit: Sarwar Panhwar

By Rina S. Khan  14 July 2020

This year’s locust attacks, which spread from Kenya to Pakistan and India, are the worst in the past 30 years.

In mid-June, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued a threat level warning to countries across East Africa and southwest Asia: Desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) are swarming. A severe outbreak that started in 2019 has spread across the Horn of Africa and the Middle East before moving on to western Asia. Scientists say climate change has played a role in this invasion.

Usually solitary, locusts become gregarious, or swarm, when there are heavy rains in an arid region. Desert locust swarms are highly destructive, sparing no greenery in sight.

This mango tree in Hyderabad, Pakistan, is devoid of its leaves, which were consumed by a swarm of desert locusts. Credit: Sarwar Panhwar

This year’s locust attacks, which spread from Kenya to Pakistan and India, are the worst in the past 30 years and may be the most economically destructive since the 1960s, said Chaudhry Inayatullah, a former research scientist at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi, Kenya. The swarms are expected to peak this month, as a wetter-than-normal monsoon arrives, and to flourish as the rains continue through October.

Inayatullah and other locust experts fear that these attacks will only get worse. Climate change is altering the dynamics of pest control and reproduction, said Keith Cressman, the FAO’s senior locust forecaster. Changes in climate have led to increases in cyclones, which feed locust swarms with water and warmth.

Recent research also shows that human-induced warming may be intensifying a regional variability in an Indian Ocean pattern of warming and cooling called the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), sometimes nicknamed the “Indian Niño.” A more intense IOD could cause more frequent tropical storms and heavy rains. These rains create perfect conditions for locust breeding, with more water and warmth ideal for increased plant biomass to feed the locusts—which is what happened in 2019, when a record IOD led to above-average rainfall in the coastal areas of Somalia, Yemen, and some regions bordering the Red Sea.

During droughts, locust outbreaks do not occur in the region, mostly because of a lack of plants for the insects to eat. But higher temperatures associated with climate change coupled with increased availability of plants for food could speed up the locusts’ maturation and incubation during spring, Inayatullah said. This year, warmer temperatures have already allowed an extra generation of breeding to occur in northwest Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and southwest Asia, amplifying the overall risk of a locust plague, the most serious category of locust threat identified by the FAO.

Perfect Storms for Locusts

An increased number of cyclones in the past 3 years in the Indian Ocean played a role in the current upsurge in locust activity.

“If this trend of increased frequency of cyclones in [the] Indian Ocean continues, then certainly, that’s going to translate to an increase in locust swarms in the Horn of Africa,” said Cressman. An increased number of cyclones in the past 3 years in the Indian Ocean played a role in the current upsurge. “In 2018, two cyclones dumped heavy rain on the uninhabited portion of the Arabian Peninsula known as the Empty Quarter. There, locusts can breed and reproduce freely. Three generations of breeding occurred in 9 months in the Empty Quarter, causing locust numbers to increase by 8,000 times.” Cressman said that outbreak is the source of the East Africa upsurge the FAO is warning about now.

The swarms can jump oceans, and they leapt over the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to the Horn of Africa late last year. “There, another cyclone in December 2019 triggered yet another spasm of reproduction that could give rise to two more generations of breeding—400 times the locusts,” Cressman said.

Climate anomalies have allowed desert locust populations to have “reproductive spasms” several times this year. Credit: Sarwar Panhwar

Heavy rains in Yemen and Saudi Arabia prompted the spread of locusts into Iran and Pakistan. They have also managed to breed in Pakistan’s Balochistan Province adjacent to Iran, are currently sweeping across the country’s southern agricultural belt, and have entered India across the Rajasthan desert. Drifting with the wind, some individuals have even been captured in Nepal. The FAO says the spring-bred swarms along both sides of the Indian-Pakistan border were poised to mature and lay eggs in early July, and new swarms will arrive from the Horn of Africa in mid-July.

Already, some farmers in Pakistan have reported up to 50% losses of their cotton crops. Ghulam Sarwar Panhwar, who owns two farms on around 120 hectares of land in the Hyderabad District of Sindh, said three locust attacks hit his farm in the past 3 months.

“Each time it is like a black cloud descending from the sky. There are millions of them, and they attack the cotton and other crops, eating all the green leaves in just 3–4 hours’ time before moving on,” Panhwar said. “Half of my cotton crop is gone. We chase them off by beating drums and banging metal plates. What else can we do?”

Aside from eating cash crops, the locusts are also consuming fodder plants, which will affect livestock.

Climate Controls

Meanwhile, the FAO has asked Pakistan and India to remain on high alert. India, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan are all part of FAO’s Commission for Controlling the Desert Locust in South-West Asia. “Intercountry cooperation is needed to tackle the locust threat. Where they fly next depends on wind direction, speed, and other weather parameters,” Inayatullah said.

A farmer holds one locust out of the thousands that have ravaged crops in Pakistan. Credit: Sarwar Panhwar

Accurate wind forecasts could be helpful to understand possible new landing sites, where aerial and ground spraying operations for pesticide applications could be readied in advance. Spraying in desert breeding areas in Pakistan has been underway since February, the region’s early spring, and could have its own set of ecological impacts.

The locust swarms eventually will dwindle in the cooler and drier winter months. No longer gregarious, “they will change back to their solitary phase,” Inayatullah said, “but by then they would have spread over vast areas and would have enough fat in them to stay alive even without food—until warmer weather arrives. This would be the ideal time to monitor and control them.”

—Rina Saeed Khan (@rinasaeed), Science Writer

Citation: Khan, R. S. (2020), Record locust swarms hint at what’s to come with climate change, Eos, 101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EO146954. Published on 14 July 2020.

Text © 2020. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

 

Worsening Water Crisis in the Eastern Caribbean

Scientists, policy makers, and residents are concerned that ongoing water shortages and longer periods of drought may worsen as the climate changes and that the Paris Agreement has fallen short.

Many plants in the tropical forests and woodlands of Saint Lucia are not drought tolerant. Credit: georama, CC-BY-3.0

By Sarah Peter  22 July 2020

For years, people living in the eastern Caribbean have not had reliable supplies of fresh water: Their homes might go for months without running showers or flushing toilets, let alone potable fresh water on tap.

The region suffers from a severe and worsening water crisis, and this year is breaking records. In May, the government of Saint Lucia declared a water emergency for the island’s approximately 180,000 residents. In a Facebook post in early June, Prime Minister Allen Chastanet raised the alarm that the country is “currently experiencing drought conditions said to be the worst in more than 50 years.” The island’s sole reservoir is at “alarmingly low water levels,” Chastanet said, owing to lower than average rainfall made worse by heavy siltation that has reduced the reservoir’s capacity by “a whopping 30%.”

Although they contribute far less than 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, eastern Caribbean islands are among the first to experience the most destructive impacts of climate change.

Although they contribute far less than 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, small island nations like the ones that make up the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States are among the first to experience the most destructive impacts of climate change: sea level rise, increased storm activity, and coastal erosion. One of the inevitable casualties is water supply.

“We are already seeing it. It’s like we do not actually have a rainy season in the Caribbean,” said Judith Gobin, a marine biologist at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. Climate change has shifted the hydrological cycle in the region, with more intense rainfall and longer dry spells.

Venantius Descartes, senior meteorologist at Saint Lucia Meteorological Services, said that paradoxically, increases in storms and hurricanes as a result of climate change have exacerbated the island’s water shortage. As bigger storms bring more water, they destroy infrastructure and lead to contamination, affecting the distribution and quality of the water supply in the region.

The hurricane season this year has already seen two named storms in June, the first month of the Caribbean hurricane season. That’s “too soon,” according to Dale Destin, a climatologist and director of the Antigua and Barbuda Meteorological Services. The phenomenon has happened only four times since 1886.

Missing Water

Tamisha Daniel, a resident of Bois Patat, Saint Lucia, fears that the current water shortage may become worse. At times when there is “not a drop of water in the house,” taking care of her newborn son can feel daunting, said the mother of two. “When to bathe him and to wash his clothes, it’s a bit of a challenge because we do not have the water, and to make it worse, it’s not raining. So you can’t collect water…and it’s so hot!” Daniel considers herself lucky, as a neighboring community, Odlum City, has not seen pipe-borne water for over 2 months.

Cleon Athill is vice president of The Movement, an environmental organization that works toward good governance on the island of Antigua, which has a population of over 80,000.

“We see our dams and wells drying up, and our drought periods are getting longer and drier.”

“We see our dams and wells drying up, and our drought periods are getting longer and drier,” Athill said. “Farmers suffer the most, they depend on piped water, but this is inadequate and inconsistent. Many residents must haul or buy water, which can be a burden for deprived communities.”

The water company that supplies Saint Lucia, for example, relies on the reservoir and river flows, but those flows have been unreliable. Storms might muddy the waters enough that even after treatment the taps deliver sediment-laden water. The company rations water at times, leading residents to seek out friends and acquaintances in other neighborhoods with running taps or to collect untreated water from rivers and waterfalls.

Small island nations throughout the eastern Caribbean are experiencing a similar plight. Tourism dependent, most of the large hotels and resorts that cater to foreign visitors are owned by foreign companies that treat wastewater on site for reuse as nonpotable water and can maintain water tanks filled with tap water. Meanwhile, most local communities do not have the space or funding for large water storage tanks, which can hold enough for months.

Previous drought has led to such measures as charging farmers for extracting water from certain rivers in Trinidad and Tobago and asking residents in Barbados to adopt voluntary conservation methods. Rain-fed agriculture in these island nations means that drought can lead to food insecurity, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned in a 2016 report.

Too Little, Too Late?

Signatories of the Paris Agreement, which came into force in 2016 and builds on years of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreed to keep the increase in global average temperature to below 2℃, instead of a far more ambitious target of 1.5℃, as requested by small island developing states (SIDS). A long-term global temperature increase above 1.5℃ would be disastrous to SIDS and the eastern Caribbean, contributing to sea level rise, coastal erosion, and loss of habitats.

At the heart of the Paris Agreement is the Green Climate Fund, intended to help the eastern Caribbean region and other SIDS by providing billions of dollars for climate adaptation projects. The initial resource mobilization of $10.3 billion fell to $9.8 billion after the United States withdrew $2 billion of the $3 billion that was initially pledged.

Islands in the eastern Caribbean have received funding from other sources, said Gobin, who participated in past projects focused on coastal livelihood strategies. However, she contends the money is not properly spent, with funding going toward administration and foreign consultants, instead of to the technical aspects of local projects.

“What comes out of this is a lovely report that describes situations. But it lacks that practical aspect for a clean supply of water,” Gobin said. She called for a reexamination of this approach.

Cardinal Warde, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a scientific adviser to the government of Barbados, agreed. “I believe that people in poor communities have reason to believe not much is going to happen,” he said.

The Paris Agreement is “too little, too late,” said Destin.

“Even if there is funding from the Green Climate Fund to deal with adaptation and mitigation,” said Eden Charles, a former United Nations ambassador who was the lead negotiator for Trinidad and Tobago for the Paris Agreement, “that doesn’t trickle down sufficiently to deal with the plight of the rural poor—the farmers, artisans, and workers—and doesn’t deal with whether the fisherman is being impacted and whether there is a greater impact of coastal erosion.”

Charles also noted that the Paris Agreement is based on voluntary commitments: “If there is a breach, there is no recourse; if it was legally binding, there would be,” he said. One of the largest signatories of the agreement, the United States, has decided to withdraw, a decision that will become effective this November.

The Paris Agreement is “too little, too late,” said Destin. “The forecast is for us to get drier in the future [in the eastern Caribbean]. We have missed or [are] about to miss the point of return. We are pretty much at the point where we cannot do enough to prevent hazardous climate change.”

—Sarah Peter (@SarahPeter3), Science Writer

Citation: Peter, S. (2020), Worsening water crisis in the eastern Caribbean, Eos, 101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EO147278. Published on 22 July 2020.

Text © 2020. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0