Social Science Research Council

The Social Science of Climate Change (SSCC) Initiative represents an effort to bring the knowledge and expertise of the social sciences to bear on the effects and responses to environmental change on a range of scales, from the local to the global.  As the natural scientists struggle to model the potentially disastrous effects of global warming – rising sea levels, severe weather patterns, freshwater shortages, shifting climatic zones – social scientists have yet to make a much-needed contribution to these public debates. As recent assessment reports suggest, including the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) and the National Research Center’s evaluation of progress of the U.S. Climate Change Program, the contributions of the social sciences require not only a robust engagement with the natural sciences, but also a “scaling down” of research sites in order to study the institutional and cultural logics informing the adaptation and responses of communities susceptible to the unpredictable effects of environmental change.

The SSCC Initiative aims to systematically bring the social sciences to bear on these issues.  We seek to encourage and support regional and cross-regional interdisciplinary research, training, and dialogue between researchers, experts, and the public.  Programming will include workshops and working groups of researchers brought together to identify the key issues and directions of work; roundtables, lectures, forums, and other mechanisms of engaging the scholarly community in this conversation; and a set of printed and online resources and tools with which to strengthen the presence of the social sciences in both local and global environmental debates.

For further information about the initiative, contact environment@ssrc.org.