For sociologists, a strong call to action in the report of an NSF sponsored workshop on Sociological Perspectives on Global Climate Change. Like the APA report I wrote about earlier, it’s a call to action, covering the key research challenges for the field, and addressing the barriers that might prevent researchers participating in such research. Among the recommendations are better data collection on organisational and community behaviour relevant to climate change, and better inter-disciplinary links:
“…social scientists are seldom consulted except as an afterthought in natural science and engineering research projects […and…] social scientists tend not to seek out collaborations with natural scientists and engineers and often are uninformed about major research programs on climate change. The result is that the research of each community does not tend to be informed by the insights and resources available from the others. This is true not only between the social sciences and the natural sciences, but among the social sciences themselves. For instance, sociological research projects seldom incorporate spatial processes, behavioral analyses, or economic models.
For a short summary, read the article “The Wisdom of Crowds” in this week’s Nature Reports, and indeed, the editorial that goes with it.