COOCLIMATH The Emergence and Dynamics of Cultures of Cooperation : Mathematical Modeling in the Context of Climate Change and Climate Extremes

Promoting cooperation towards public goods is particularly challenging. For cooperation to spread based on social standing, reputation must correlate with cooperative behavior? »how can such a social norm be established? Although there are plausible narratives for particular norm shifts, quantitative theory is scarce. We propose to (i) abstract this fundamental problem as one of the joint adaptive dynamics of cooperation and non-vertical transmission, (ii) develop novel mathematics to analyse these models, and (iii) exercise the highly interdisciplinary expertise of COOCLIMATH to apply the results. Of particular interest is the effect of environmental fluctuations, including extreme events, with the goal of predicting their effects across scales of time, space, and social structure. Our highly interdisciplinary project will advance the mathematical framework of cultural evolution and human cooperation, and yield novel insights into the emergence and dynamics of ?cultures of cooperation’ in globally changing environments.