Is Environmental Science Failing Society? Strategies for Rapid Progress on Climate Action

Much has changed in the two decades since I (JL) proposed that scientists should re-examine their obligations to society in order to serve society better. Today, more environmental scientists are actively sharing their science broadly, conducting use-inspired science (sensu Stokes) in addition to basic science, engaging with society, and crafting solutions to problems not just diagnosing them—all very welcome and exciting developments. For the most part, however, environmental scientists have taken on these extra duties because they believed it was the right thing to do and despite the considerable impediments that exist within academia. But make no mistake, the culture of academia continues to impede progress. As a result, although the above actions have had demonstrable effect, their collective impact falls far short of what is needed if society is to tackle effectively the disruption underway due to climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, pandemics, and more. Actions by individuals can take us only so far. To truly help society meet its grand challenges, environmental scientists must now make a quantum leap in engagement with society. It is time for strategic, collective action to change the culture of academia and create the enabling conditions for science to serve society better.

Taking as a starting point Jane Lubchenco's call for a renewed social contract for environmental science, this paper advances a framework for science's place in society in which justice is central. A social contract is a desired vision of social order that distributes rights, responsibilities, and obligations among political actors. The magnitude of global ecological change, our collective inability to address ecological crises, and populist challenges to science have renewed interest in debates about existing social contracts with science. While Lubchenco's vision of a social contract focuses on practical ways to improve the engagement of scientists with decision-makers and citizens, we argue that to achieve the objectives laid out by Lubchenco, justice—encompassing representation, distribution, and recognition—must be at the core of science-society relations. A justice-centred social contract with science requires acknowledgement on the part of scientists, administrators, decision-makers, and citizens of the biases, inequalities and inequities contained within and advanced by academic institutions. Orienting science towards justice provides a starting point for a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable culture of publicly-funded research.

A major barrier to achieving wide-spread progress on planning for impacts from climate change is the lack of trained scientists skilled at conducting societally-relevant research. Overcoming this barrier requires us to transform the way we train scientists so they are equipped to work with a range of different societal partners and institutions to produce the science needed to address climate change and society's other pressing environmental challenges. As researchers at climate research organizations that work directly with decision-makers and stakeholders to produce decision-relevant science, we are entrenched in advancing actionable climate science. Based on our experience preparing scientists for similar careers, we offer a perspective on a path for the academy to better develop, train and support scientists to conduct societally relevant research. We emphasize the need for science training that builds collaborative science skills at different career stages to develop a strong community of practice around actionable climate science. We offer insights from our training and capacity-building programs to demonstrate this transformation, and point to strategies that can be adopted at other universities to grow the capacity of scientists to support society in achieving rapid progress on climate action.

By some counts, up to 98% of environmental news stories are negative in nature. Implicit in this number is the conventional wisdom among many communicators that increasing people's understanding, awareness, concern or even fear of climate change are necessary precursors for action and behavior change. In this article we review scientific theories of mind and brain that explain why this conventional view is flawed. In real life, the relationship between beliefs and behavior often goes in the opposite direction: our actions change our beliefs, awareness and concerns through a process of self-justification and self-persuasion. As one action leads to another, this process of self-persuasion can go hand in hand with a deepening engagement and the development of agency—knowing how to act. One important source of agency is learning from the actions of others. We therefore propose an approach to climate communication and storytelling that builds people's agency for climate action by providing a wide variety of stories of people taking positive action on climate change. Applied at scale, this will shift the conceptualization of climate change from 'issue-based' to 'action-based'. It will also expand the current dominant meanings of 'climate action' (i.e. 'consumer action' and 'activism') to incorporate all relevant practices people engage in as members of a community, as professionals and as citizens. We close by proposing a systematic approach to get more reference material for action-based stories from science, technology and society to the communities of storytellers—learning from health communication and technologies developed for COVID-19.

Advantageous new ideas and practices have a vexing track record of taking root slowly, if at all. Identifying or creating, and then supporting, communities of practice is a promising approach to enhancing the likelihood that science-based environmental science knowledge will be applied to solve societal problems. A community of practice, simply put, is a group of individuals who have shared interests and problems related to a specific topic. This article provides a brief overview of what communities of practice are, and how they might be embraced as a strategy to accelerate the development of climate change solutions. The approach is illustrated with a brief case study of Climate Matters, a highly successful program designed to support TV weathercasters as local climate change educators. It concludes with a heuristic to guide future efforts at supporting communities of practice.

After decades of inadequate responses to scientists' warnings about global environmental threats, leading analysts of the science-policy interface are seeking an important shift of research focus. This switch is from continued modeling and diagnoses of biogeochemical conditions in favor of enhanced efforts to understand the many socio-political obstacles to achieving just transformations towards sustainability, and how to overcome them. We discuss why this shift continues to prove elusive. We argue that rarely analyzed mutually reinforcing power structures, interests, needs, and norms within the institutions of global environmental change science obstruct rethinking and reform. The blockage created by these countervailing forces are shielded from scrutiny and change through retreats behind shields of neutrality and objectivity, stoked and legitimated by fears of losing scientific authority. These responses are maladaptive, however, since transparency and reflexivity are essential for rethinking and reform, even in contexts marked by anti-environmentalism. We therefore urge greater openness, self-critique, and power-sharing across research communities, to create spaces and support for conversations, diverse knowledges, and decisions conducive to sustainability transformations.

In Canada, the agricultural sector has long held a prominent economic, social and cultural position, from substantial evidence of extensive fishing and farming since the times of the first human settlements, to currently accounting for over 100 billion dollars of production and employing 2.3 million people. Steady growth in agricultural production in the country over several decades, supported by strong investment in public agricultural science, has allowed an increasing supply of a wide variety of food and agricultural goods to be available both within the country as well as allowing for substantial exports abroad and deep integration of the Canadian agricultural sector into global markets. Along with securing continued productivity growth in agricultural output for the future, policy makers and public sector agricultural scientists in Canada have become increasingly concerned with managing environmental externalities associated with agricultural production in order to achieve the objective of sustainable intensification of the sector. However, the process of identification of the best tools and practices to improve the sustainability of the agricultural sector in Canada has evolved over time due to shifting research priorities and dynamic changes in the problems facing the sector. In this paper we discuss applied and direct-to-farmer agricultural science research initiatives that are focused on identification and implementation of best environmental management practices at the farm level. We believe that involving farmers directly in scientific research and communication of scientific results provides for a deeper understanding of agro-environmental externalities. It also allows farmers to find greater adoption potential in their specific farm system, thus combining both environmental and economic sustainability. We trace the history of public agricultural science engagement with Canadian farmers to address economic and environmental problems in the sector. We then provide examples of successful public sector projects based in applied agricultural science research that foster effective farmer/scientist collaboration, leading to improved agriculture sustainability in Canada.