Naysayers aside, the world appears to have nudged its way toward the view that there is a scientific consensus that human activity has changed our climate. For many academics, the question is now about finding ways of dealing with the consequences of climate change. In that endeavor, natural scientists are increasingly being joined by other academics — most notably social scientists — in teams where many disciplines can interact.
But there is concern that a government desire in the UK to protect science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects by ringfencing funding could, in the long term, affect the ability of these teams to conduct research.
For Paul Wellings, chairman-elect of the 1994 group of smaller research-intensive universities in the UK, it is a question of getting together what he calls a “dream team,” comprising not just scientists, but researchers from the social sciences and humanities, to deal with the nightmare scenario recently conjured by the UK government’s chief scientist John Beddington, in which the world is gripped by a “perfect storm” of war, starvation and mass migration.
For Wellings, it is not enough simply to rely on science and technology to come up with the answers we need. Looking at individuals’ behavior and getting them to change that is, he argues, as important as new technology.
While not opposed to ringfencing per se, he argues for a more nuanced approach, with support maintained for social sciences and humanities.
“If we were asked as institutions to help solve major global challenges and asked what is the ‘dream team’ that we would want to field for doing that, as soon as you start to put that together there are engineers, technocrats and very often people in the humanities and the social sciences,” Wellings said.
At the sharp end of what he is talking about are people such as Sarah Curtis, a geographer heading a group of Durham University academics working with engineers from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University on a project to discover how storms, floods and heat waves caused by climate change might affect the elderly and how infrastructure can be tailored to cope.
“Multidisciplinary work helps engineers and scientists, as well as the professional carers, tackle extreme weather events in the future and keep services running,” Curtis said. “They also need to understand from the people receiving those services what’s important to them and that’s where the social science perspective comes in — really being able to interpret events and problems from different social perspectives.”
“The social science perspective isn’t just about individual behavior, but helps us to think about the way that people work and interact together. I would argue that what’s important to people and how they tackle problems is not just down to individual characteristics, but also to the social circumstances they’re in,” she said.
She is concerned about an over-reliance on STEM subjects to provide solutions to climate change.
“This isn’t just about sharing academic knowledge, but also the public debate as well, because in all honesty I don’t think that natural scientists have all the answers to the problems we’re facing over climate change and neither do I think that social scientists have the solutions. So we are going to have to negotiate across these different points of view if we are going to move forward,” she said.
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