Workshop on Sociological Perspectives on Global Climate Change

(5) Understanding decision support needs for climate change responses and how to meet them (“Decision

support” means getting useful science about climate change and its likely effects produced and used.

What is needed is contingent on the decision, the decision maker, the temporal and spatial scale, etc. In

virtually all cases, new communication links and networks will be needed to educate the scientists about

what information is needed, educate decision makers about what science can offer, and develop roles for

those who can convey these messages and get the needed information to those who can benefit.

(6) Coordinating response efforts across scales

The discussion paper also identifies four critical constraints on progress: limitations in total level of
research support, data needs and limitations, connections with the basic social and behavioral sciences, and
organizational barriers in the federal government. The second and third of these are particularly relevant for this
meeting:

Disciplinary issues: Issues such as environmental consumption, land-use change, and valuation of environmental
resources do not yield easily to discipline-specific concepts, theories, or methods, and as a result some of the
social science disciplines, sociology included, do not easily link their concepts and tools to issues defined in
these ways. For early-career scientists in such disciplines, work on climate change can interfere with career
advancement because the most important publication outlets are interdisciplinary.

Data issues: Developing an interdisciplinary observational system for the human dimensions of climate could
provide an important opportunity for addressing some of the disciplinary issues because analytic tools that are
well developed in sociology (e.g., for analysis of multivariate and time-series data) could be applied to questions
that were not previously tractable. Some of the research would prominently include sociological variables
and thus move sociological research forward as a contributor to understanding of an important set of societal
problems.