GEN499 Discussion Week 1 Final Paper Topic

The global societal issue that I choose for my week 5 final paper is climate change. I choose this topic because of its controversial nature whereby the factors leading to climate change and the effects of climate change have not been fully looked into. In order to identify and narrow down to this topic I first searched on other topics such as education and pollution but I did not find them very interesting and the university library did not have relevant information on other topics. I therefore arrived at climate first before narrowing down to climate change since it has not been critically analyzed.

In order to determine whether a source is scholarly, the CRAAP test can be used. This test provides five ways of analyzing sources to determine if they are scholarly. The CRAAP test is an acronym that stands for currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose. Currency entails the timelessness of the information. Relevance entails the importance of the information provided by the source for your needs. Authority is about the author in terms of the qualifications and any affiliations. Accuracy entails the correctness of the information of the articles and if it supported by evidence. Finally, purpose is about whether the information the source provides is objective and if the author makes his intentions clear ( Ashford University Library, 2017).

The first article I found in the Ashford library database is entitled, “Farming in the Face of Uncertainty: How Colombian Coffee Farmers Conceptualize and Communicate Their Experiences With Climate Change”. The research in the article was focused on how agricultural producers communicate their firsthand experiences with climate change impacts. The findings of the study illustrate the conditions underlying Colombian coffee farmers’ belief that climate change impacts threaten their livelihoods and put farmers in a constant state of uncertainty (Lambert & Eise, 2020)

The second article that I found in the Ashford library database was entitled, “Global food security in 2050: the role of agricultural productivity and climate change”. The article analyzes how the complexities introduced by trends in agricultural productivity and climate change affect the future of global food security. There was the use of a partial equilibrium model of global agriculture incorporating a food security module that links changes in the average dietary energy intake to shifts in the full caloric distribution. After validating the model against an historical period, a series of future scenarios were implemented to understand the impacts of key exogenous drivers on selected food security outcomes. Climate change adds uncertainty to these projections, depending critically on the crop yield impacts of increasing carbon IV oxide concentrations in the atmosphere (Baldos & Hertel, 2014)

There are several reasons why I choose to use scholarly articles. Scholarly journal articles are unique in that they require authors to document and make verifiable the sources of the facts, ideas and methods they used to arrive at their insights and conclusions. Scholarly articles also strive to identify and discuss the merits of alternative explanations and viewpoints for the positions they espouse. This makes it easier to asses the strengths and weaknesses of the claims made in a paper.

Resources:

Ashford University Library. (2017, November). What is CRAAP? Retrieved from https://content.bridgepointeducation.com/curriculum/file/f8a1ef48-2a27-4450-b3d0-242d91015f8d/1/CRAAP%20accessible.pdf

Baldos, U. L. C., & Hertel, T. W. (2014). Global food security in 2050: The role of agricultural productivity and climate change. Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 58(4), 554–570. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8489.12048 Links to an external site.

Lambert, N. J., & Eise, J. (2020). Farming in the Face of Uncertainty: How Colombian Coffee Farmers Conceptualize and Communicate Their Experiences With Climate Change. International Journal of Communication, 14(0), 21.