2013 Report: Changing Global Environments

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The World Social Science Report 2013 issues an urgent call to action to the international social science community to collaborate more effectively with each other, with colleagues from other fields of science, and with the users of research to deliver solutions-oriented knowledge on today’s most pressing environmental problems. It calls for a transformative social science that is bolder, better, bigger, different:

• bolder in reframing and reinterpreting global environmental change as a social problem
• better at infusing social science insights into real-world problem-solving
• bigger in terms of having more social scientists to focus on global environmental change
• different in the way it thinks about and does research that helps meet the vexing sustainability challenges faced today.

Around 150 authors from all over the world and a wide range of disciplines offer insights that help us understand the challenges before us. The report is divided into nine sections:

Introduction: Social sciences in a changing global environment
Key messages and recommendations: Global environmental change changes everything
The complexity and urgency of global environmental change and social transformation
Social science capacity in global environmental change research
The consequences of global environmental change for society
Conditions and visions for change and sense-making in a rapidly changing world
The responsibilities and ethical challenges in tackling global environmental change
New approaches to governance and decision-making
Contributions from International Social Science Council members, programmes and partners

The World Social Science Report 2013 was launched on Friday, 15 November 2013, at the UNESCO General Conference in Paris. The report was prepared by the ISSC and co-published with UNESCO and the OECD.

It is available in print from UNESCO Publishing - UNESCO ISBN 978-92-3-104254-6