RCN-SEES: Network for Utilization of Social Science Research on Sustainability and Energy (NUSSRoSE)

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Climate change offers a unique challenge for human problem solving. Whereas evolution has equipped us to address immediate threats to life or limb, climate change is a slow-moving threat, largely understood through the eyes of climate scientists, who admit uncertainty in how quickly or slowly change will take place. It is not surprising that polling shows that even the US public persuaded by the science does not give this issue priority. Nevertheless, significant action is required now to contain a threat that may not fully manifest itself for decades. An increasingly rich body of work in a range of behavioral sciences - including cognitive and social psychology, anthropology, behavioral economics and sociology - is examining human cognition and motivation and gaining insights about decision processes. This research may hold the key to building constituencies for addressing climate change and for motivating behavioral change. However, its results are largely confined to academic literature, and locked, for the most part, in stylized language that is not always accessible to the many non-governmental organizations, businesses and others who would benefit from its insights. Our Research Coordination Network (RCN) is designed to make the insights gained from this work more accessible to practitioners. Work now underway and anticipated will provide insights into alternative ways to address climate challenge and its unique demand for upfront investments to deliver benefits that are by necessity uncertain and far into the future, accruing to future generations and to geographically distant regions. The network will act as a market maker, using physical and virtual meetings and a software platform to create a forum for the integration and sharing of theory, results, and experience (a) across disciplinary lines, to stimulate robust cross-fertilization, additional research, cross-training of postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty members, and (b) between the academic supply side and the practitioner demand side building better two-way communication between these two communities. Our RCN will help build a multi- or trans-disciplinary sub-specialty that will raise the status, profile and reach of individual efforts as well as create awareness for the need of institutional support to maintain and use research output of this sort, attracting more creative minds into the effort, including young researchers. Equally important, the RCN will find systematic ways for dissemination and to connect research to application. It will do so in part by integrating into this platform approach the knowledge and needs of the non-governmental world and of government policy-makers.