Adding People to the Climate Change Equation - Miller-McCune
Changing how business and government operate can be a slow and difficult process. But altering the way science is done is even stickier and more ponderous.
Nonetheless, scientists from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds at this week’s Planet Under Pressure Conference moved a step closer to creating a new, integrated entity to coordinate and advance research on global environmental change. A key aspect of the integration is including behavioral science to a much greater extent in a field that has been seen as a biophysical sciences playground.
As David Willetts, Britain’s Minister of State for Universities and Science, said in his closing-day address, “At this conference, the social sciences and humanities are taking center stage.”
The conference, held in London, is itself a buildup to the 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, dubbed Rio+20 as it marks two decades since the groundbreaking United Nations’ Rio summit that produced two landmark treaties, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Planet Under Pressure’s conferees developed a four-page State of the Planet Declaration summarized here: