Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change (2009) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix D: Fundamental Research Priorities to Improve the Understanding of Human Dimensions of Climate Change
Appendix D: Fundamental Research Priorities to Improve the Understanding of Human Dimensions of Climate Change
Pages 167-202
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has established a Committee on Strategic Advice on the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, charged with two tasks.
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The other is an equivalent summary of priorities related to the natural sciences. As initially articulated by Strategic Advice committee member Charles Kolstad, the assignment was to prepare a "paper on social science priorities" as an input to the workshop, identifying up to 10 top priorities and considering ways to increase the engagement of core disciplines as well as multidisciplinary researchers.
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We believe that research advice to CCSP is more appropriately considered the latter. Human Dimensions Research Throughout its 19-year history, in its attention to climate change as a special case of global environmental change, the CHDGC has been concerned with human systems drivers of climate change, human systems impacts of climate change, and human systems responses to concerns about or observed effects of climate change.
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Human Dimensions as a Distinct Interdisciplinary Field Many scientists who conduct fundamental research on human– environment interactions conceive of the area as a distinct interdisciplinary field or even a distinct discipline. Various names have been proposed for this field, including human ecology, human– environment science (Stern, 1993)
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This issue is discussed below under "Critical Constraints." History of Priority-Related Discussions For almost two decades, committees and panels of the NRC have considered priorities for research on the human dimensions of global environmental change and/or global sustainability. Multiple major studies have helped to provide intellectual foundations for the field, and many others identify research priorities for all or part of the field.
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conceptualized the link between consumption and environment and identified and illustrated promising research possibilities on the causes of environmentally significant consumption. Publications primarily identifying research directions include: • Decision Making for the Environment (NRC, 2005a)
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helped define human dimensions research as a coherent intellectual enterprise and recommended a plan for national research in the area. Since the publication of Our Common Journey (NRC, 1999d)
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An underlying question from NSF was why so few social scientists submit proposals to crossdisciplinary programs related to human aspects of environmental issues. Particular problems are perceived in several social and behavioral science disciplines in which academic reward systems emphasize contributions to established core subfields or theoretical debates rather than to fundamental understanding of societal problems.
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In the other CCSP agencies, research that draws on the social sciences is mainly addressed to fairly narrow applications of science to problem solving in such mission-defined fields as environmental regulation, coastal and water resource management, agricultural and forest resource management, and energy supply and use. These programs make use of human dimensions research knowledge and tools, such as environmental economics, but they seldom invest in improving the fundamental knowledge on which such applications stand.
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Human response to climate change depends fundamentally on judgment and decision making under uncertainty, and improved fundamental understanding of these processes continues to be central to the human dimensions research agenda (e.g., NRC, 1992, 1999a, 2005a)
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The research agenda includes documenting the institutions shaping these activities from local to global levels, understanding the conditions under which the institutions can effectively advance mitigation and adaptation goals, and improving the understanding of conditions for institutional innovation and change. This area has a long history in human dimensions research (see NRC, 2002c)
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This is such a central issue for climate change -- related to greenhouse gas emissions, emission sinks, impacts, and responses -- that it seems remarkable that a capac ity does not exist to project such changes beyond a decade or two. Largely because of limitations in the ability to project
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The research agenda also includes efforts to design and test social processes for evaluating options (e.g., citizen juries, negotiations, public participation mechanisms) and to find ways to integrate formal scientific techniques with such processes in what have been called analytic-deliberative processes (NRC, 1996)
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Discussions of the observational system for climate change science rarely consider the state of observations of the human systems that drive and are affected by climate change. The CCSP strategic plan and the program itself give extensive consideration to observing and monitoring states of the climate and related environmental systems, but no explicit attention to observing or monitoring human pressures on those systems or human responses to climate change.
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On the consequences side, climate change science leaders are reminded at every national workshop that most of these issues are linked inextricably with regions and locations. Climate modelers are urged to "downscale," while researchers assimilating sets of local case studies seek to "upscale." In fact, place-based approaches to integrated understanding are fundamental to sustainability science (Kates et
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. How the Fundamental Research Priorities Were Determined A wide range of possible research needs was identified by the earlier agenda-setting reports for global environmental change research and sustainability science already discussed.
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Taken together with research on the natural systems aspects of climate science, this research would improve the ability to project the human impacts of climate change. Research on priorities 2, 4, and 6 would help improve the ability of individuals and decisionmaking organizations to gain a more complete understanding of the implications of response options and thus to make better informed and more widely accepted choices.
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Such research may not examine climate issues directly, but it illuminates processes that fundamentally shape human interactions with climate. As already noted, fundamental human dimensions research is sometimes not recognized by government agencies as mission relevant.
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The impacts of climate change depend on the conjunction of physical and biological events, driven by climatic processes, with social and economic developments occurring on the same timescales in the affected places. Much attention has been given to improving projections of future biophysical events, but far less has been given to measuring and projecting the social, economic, and cultural conditions that determine the human consequences of those events: the ways economic development, human population dynamics, investments in physical infrastructure and emergency response capabilities, changes in the demand for water and other resources, land-use change, emissions of toxic substances, and other changes combine to alter the populations, places, and sectors that may experience climate-related shocks and thus affect their vulnerabilities.
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Efforts to mitigate climate change by altering the driving forces depend on inducing social and behavioral change in individuals, organizations, and institutions. Much of the needed change takes the form of inducing innovation and adoption of technologies for energy efficiency and low-carbon energy production and for the design of communities and other physical infrastructure; some involves changes in the use of existing technology and infrastructure.
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. Various NRC reports have elaborated on segments of the research agenda, for example, by reviewing knowledge on the potential of education, information, and voluntary measures (NRC, 2002b)
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The benefits include a more realistic and comprehensive understanding of climate response options, their relationships to each other, and their joint effects on the human consequences of climate change.
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. The conflation of research and operational decision support activities in CCSP documents makes it difficult to assess the research elements of the program (NRC, 2007a)
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Circles indicate the especially strong links. CRITICAL CONSTRAINTS ON PROGRESS The continuing underinvestment in human dimensions research (and especially in fundamental human dimensions research)
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concluded that the human interactions science priority, then at 3 percent of the budget, was "the most critically underfunded in the fiscal 1991 budget for the USGCRP." A 1992 NRC report recommended that the level of support for human dimensions research be increased from 3 percent of the program (in FY 1991) to 5 percent, with a 3-year ramp-up period.
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TABLE D.1 Relationship Between Fundamental Research Priorities and Focused Research Needs 192 APPENDIX D
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Because of the longstanding underfunding of human dimensions research, we do not think that expanded development of the above priority areas can be achieved by reallocating funds from other areas of human dimensions research that are already well developed. If funding for climate change research continues to be flat, we think these priorities can only be developed by reallocating funds from well-developed areas of natural systems research.
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Such an effort, in addition to its value for research, could provide new opportunities for social science research that would attract early-career and established researchers from the disciplines into global change research and thus expand the pool of strong researchers in the area. This approach also could help encourage agencies to support fundamental human dimensions research by demonstrating the mission relevance of research using social science concepts and variables.
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In our view, so far the CCSP as a program has not made efforts to speed this learning, for example, by supporting interdisciplinary graduate training programs in climate science that encourage social scientists to apply. More could be done to draw social scientists to climate change research, particularly at the predoctoral and early career stages, as noted in past NRC reviews.
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Some of these agencies support human dimensions research in particular applied areas, some of it quite valuable to the CCSP, but in our view these efforts have done little to build the kinds of fundamental knowledge prioritized earlier in this paper. The CCSP and its agencies could show leadership in addressing this challenge by supporting fundamental research on the human-system components of climate change.
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Drawing on these reviews and recent discussions at meetings of the NRC Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, this paper identifies five substantive research priorities for developing the human systems side of climate science: research on environmentally significant consumption, judgment and decision making under uncertainty, institutions and climate change, technological change, and valuation of climate change and human responses. Three crosscutting science priorities are also critical:
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For any of these priorities to be implemented, four critical constraints on scientific progress require attention: limited levels of support, data gaps, limited capability for multidisciplinary environmental research among researchers with social and behavioral science expertise, and perhaps most critical, organizational barriers to human dimensions research in federal agencies responsible for climate change science. The paper briefly discusses implementation issues related to overcoming these constraints.
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Svedin, 2001, Sustainability science, Science, 292, 641–642. Klein, R., J.A.
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NRC, 1999a, Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 100 pp. NRC, 1999b, Making Climate Forecasts Matter, P.C.
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NRC, 2004, Implementing Climate and Global Change Research: A Review of the Final U.S. Climate Change Science Program Strategic Plan, National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 108 pp.
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Smit, B., and J Wandel, 2006, Adaptation, adaptive capacity and vulnerability, Global Environmental Change, 16, 282–292.
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