Part IV: Recommendations for Advancing Sociological
Research on Global Climate Change
Workshop participants made specific
suggestions and recommendations about
what sociologists need in terms of enhanced
training, tools, outreach, and networking
to catalyze climate change research in
sociology and to forge interdisciplinary
collaborations to establish a sociological
agenda for global climate change research.
The first set of recommendations focuses
specifically on what NSF and sociologists
can do to encourage future research on
global climate change within sociology. The
second set of recommendations outlines
steps to increase sociologists’ networking,
participation, and collaboration with
other disciplines and subfields studying
global climate change. The third set of
recommendations addresses infrastructural
development to advance sociological
research on global climate change and
serve the broader research community. The
workshop papers in Appendix 3 provide
workshop participants’ analyses of the topics discussed in the sections above and contain many additional specific
recommendations.
Recommendations for Catalyzing the Discipline
Sociologists are not well-represented in the field of climate change research, including research on the human
dimensions of climate change. Organizations such as the IPCC and the major international actors that set the
social science agenda for climate change research are relatively unfamiliar to sociologists [e.g., the International
Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) or the Committee on the Human
Dimensions of Global Change (CHDGC)]. Since many sociologists studying climate change identify themselves
as environmental sociologists, the historical relationship between environmental sociology and the field at large
has limited the “mainstreaming” of environmental and climate change research in sociology. Environmental
sociology research typically has not been at the center of the discipline of sociology, and the leading journals in
Part IV: Recommendations for Advancing
Sociological Research on Global Climate Change