The fraught relationship between climate change and social science funding.
by Janavi Kanagasundaram
Climate change, climate change, climate change. It’s all we ever seem to hear in the news today, and this past year was a turning point in the awareness given to climate change, both negative and positive. Greta Thunberg was Time’s Person of the Year, and her speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit was a resounding criticism of government inaction on this issue, culminating in a warning that “the eyes of all future generations are upon you.” Her points highlighted the fact that the facts and figures of climate change have been handed to us by scientific research decades ago, but policy has remained unresponsive. Recently, scientists have found a reason as to why that might be: social science research is lacking.
In a study published in Energy Research and Social Science, researchers investigated grant funds given by donors around the world spanning the years 1950 - 2020, comparing the results between those given to the natural sciences, like biology, physics, and geology, versus the social sciences, including sociology and political science. Their work indicates a huge imbalance: the natural sciences have received a whopping 770% more in funding than the social sciences for climate change research. A 2019 study from researchers in the United Kingdom found that “only one in six publicly funded climate change projects [in the UK] has a significant social science component,” further highlighting the gap. This may seem perfectly reasonable; after all, without the basis of understanding the scientific explanations of climate change, there cannot be any initiatives made to counter it. Research within the natural and technical sciences have rightly been, and should continue to be, supported.
But comparing the timelines of when scientific data was made available to the public and of when governments and international organizations began taking action demonstrates a different perspective. That raw information is crucial, but the lack of supplementary information regarding sectors like economics, finance, and psychology has only contributed to this significant delay in processing, not only on the part of elected officials but on the common individual. The bridge between the scientific jargon and theory and day-to-day life has never been constructed, and in our rush, we’re trying to leap over this chasm.
In 1983, Elise Boulding, a Norwegian-American sociologist, wrote in her book Social Science Research and Climate Change that addressing climate change “[requires] an interdisciplinary understanding that bridges not only the gaps between the natural and social sciences but also...many often considerable differences among the individual social-science disciplines themselves.” In 2008, Dr. Amanda H. Goodall wrote that “the analysis of climate change has, if only unconsciously, been sidelined intellectually—into an area outside the journals in which the leading business scholars and other social scientists publish.” In 2019, Professor Sam Fankhauser, one of the authors of the UK study from above, writes that some of the “most important gaps” in research “include the political economy of the zero-carbon transition, poverty alleviation in a zero-carbon world, the social science of carbon capture, and the role of sustainable finance.” And now comes 2020: with studies showing the same results, little having changed over the years even with the increased spotlight. These social science topics need more attention so that policymakers can back up their agendas with solid evidence.
Sometimes, the issues that we label in the “science” category goes by the wayside when students in other disciplines look for paper topics or research proposals. There’s an idea that a student studying English Literature cannot contribute to a paper involving heavy statistics work. An idea that a Chemical Engineering major can’t figure out how to apply the theories of economics to their project. That needs to change. If we want to build this truly interdisciplinary approach in order to fix a problem that’s affecting all of us, then we need to stop confining ourselves to specific categories and aim to reach further. We need to venture off the path that we’ve been traveling for years. We need to Raise High.
Janavi Kanagasundaram is a freshman from Lansdale, Pennsylvania, majoring in International Affairs with a concentration in International Economics. Her past research projects have centered on studying the influence of beauty product advertisements on the perception of different skin shades. She currently works as an administrative assistant in GW’s Anthropology Department, writes for GW Scope, and is a member of the University Honors Program and South Asian Society.
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