| 英文摘要: | US efforts to integrate social and biophysical sciences to address the issue of global change exist within a wider movement to understand global change as a societal challenge and to inform policy. Insights from the social sciences can help transform global change research into action. Systematic identification, characterization and prioritization of the greatest and most urgent risks we face from global change, along with the appropriate responses, are scientific and societal grand challenges. A central issue confronting national and international research programs is the need to understand linked biophysical and social processes of change, and to do so in a way that supports societal responses to this change. This requires integrating the full range of disciplinary perspectives and contributions from across the global change research enterprise. Approaches to this integration have their lineage in a broad intellectual movement at least three decades in the making. Mooney and colleagues1 offer a fascinating historical perspective on the deepening connection between the social and biophysical sciences in US and international global change research programs. The growth of this movement has paralleled the growth in understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change, as the important questions have evolved from global-scale enquiries, predominantly based in physical science, to place-based, often socio-ecological and socio-economic questions about what drives these changes, what is at risk, and how we might respond. This evolution has given rise to integrated bodies of knowledge such as the 'sustainability', 'vulnerability' and 'adaptation' sciences2, 3, 4 that share a number of common dimensions: they are problem focused, with research situated within specific human decision contexts; they are interdisciplinary, in that they embrace multiple theoretical and methodological means of exploring an issue or question; and they are transdisciplinary, in that scientists and practitioners co-design and co-produce applicable research within an environment of sustained engagement. This integration is reflected in recent IPCC reports5, the coalescence of multiple international research programs into Future Earth6 and in national research efforts in countries such as Australia, the UK and Germany. The most recent World Social Science Report7 is entirely focused on the need for a social science framing of global environmental change and sustainability, aimed directly at mobilizing a fully integrated global change science around policy and action, as argued by Hackmann et al.8. This intellectual current is also reflected in the most recent decadal strategic plan of the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)9. The USGCRP coordinates global change research across the US government, and its strategic plan, for the first time, articulates an explicit vision of basic research in continuous dialogue with critical society-facing functions (Fig. 1). The existing knowledge-base supports engagement and communication with diverse publics, informs planning and policy, and is synthesized in sustained assessment processes that both support decision-making and identify the next generation of research questions. The plan has been praised for its nuanced understanding of how research can support and be supported by considerations of use, but concerns have also been raised about the practical challenges of implementing such a program10, 11, 12.
|
