World Social Science Report 2013
Changing Global Environments
Produced by the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and UNESCO, and published by the OECD, the 2013 World Social Science Report represents a comprehensive overview of the field gathering the thoughts and expertise of hundreds of social scientists from around the world.
This edition focuses on the transformative role of the social sciences in confronting climate and broader processes of environmental change, and in addressing priority problems from energy and water, biodiversity and land use, to urbanisation, migration and education.
The report includes 100 articles written by 150 authors from 41 countries all over the world. Authors represent some 24 disciplines, mainly in the social sciences.
The contributions highlight the central importance of social science knowledge for environmental change research, as a means of understanding changing environments in terms of social processes and as framework for finding concrete solutions towards sustainability.
Global environmental change changes everything: Key messages and recommendations
Drawn from the more than 150 authors in the World Social Science Report 2013, the key messages and recommendations call for a new kind of social science – one that is bolder, better, bigger, different. There is a need to reframe global environmental change as a social process, infuse social science insights into problem-solving processes, encourage more social scientists to address global environmental change directly, and change the way the social sciences think about and do science to help meet the interdisciplinary and cross-sector changes society faces.