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.
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What's the problem? Putting global environmental change into perspective
Why worry about the global environment? Are the financial crisis and poverty not far more urgent? And will technological innovation not solve global warming? Looking at problems as separate and discrete can be misleading. Global environmental changes are systemic issues that are closely related to human activities. The solutions thus lie in human actions that address the systems and structures that contribute to global environmental change. Are broader and deeper understandings needed to ensure transformative action?
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