Recommendations for catalyzing the discipline:
• Build capacity by increasing the number of researchers in the sociological study of the environment.
• Increase the presence of sociologists in climate change research and policy organizations.
• Provide funding opportunities to develop and conduct research projects that investigate the human
dimensions of climate change.
• Develop an American Sociological Association committee and position statement on climate change.
• Facilitate sociologists’ access to climate change research and policy networks.Recommendations for forging interdisciplinary collaborations:
• Facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and training.
• Encourage sociologists to embrace multi-method frameworks.
• Increase support of research networks and collaborations with natural scientists and engineers.
• Increase training of sociologists in natural science approaches to global climate change.
• Fund summer institutes that facilitate interdisciplinary working groups.Recommendations for capacity building and infrastructure development:
• Include social scientists and social science data collection in large-scale ecological observation projects
such as the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.
• Include data collection on climate change in currently supported data infrastructure projects such as the
General Social Survey (GSS), Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and the American National
Election Studies (ANES).
• Organize follow-up workshops to bring together environmental sociologists with sociologists
specializing in models and tools to inform the study of climate change such as GIS specialists,
demographers, network analysts, and consumer culture researchers.
• Develop an interdisciplinary Social Environmental Observatory Network (SEON).
• Create a training institute focused on the social dimensions of climate change.The report concludes with appendices that list workshop participants, present the workshop agenda, and include
the papers submitted by workshop participants. A complete copy of this report along with recommended readings
and other useful information for climate change students and researchers is available on the University of Kansas
Center for Research on Global Change website: http://ireswb.cc.ku.edu/~crgc/NSFWorkshop.
Executive Summary