World social science report 2013 : changing global environments

614 Pages·2013·5.3 MB·English

by  OECD

Changing Global Environments 2013 UNESCO
Publishing
Global environmental changes, including climate change, are intricately linked to
United Nations
other social, political and economic crises, from poverty and inequality to social
World Educational, Scientific and
discontent. The consequences of these interacting changes are rapidly unfolding Cultural Organization
across the world and already affect our life support systems, livelihoods and Social
lifestyles. Society must now find ways to simultaneously protect the planet’s bounty
and safeguard social equity and well-being for all. In this urgent quest, social science Science
knowledge is indispensable for understanding the causes and consequences of
Report
global environmental change and informing more effective, equitable and durable
solutions for a sustainable future. 2 World
In this third edition of the World Social Science Report, 150 authors from all over the
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world and a wide range of disciplines offer insights that help us understand the
challenges before us. The report issues an urgent call to action to the international 1
social science community to collaborate more effectively with each other, with 3
colleagues from other fields of science, and with the users of research to deliver
Social
solutions-oriented knowledge on today’s most pressing environmental problems. It
calls for a transformative social science that is:
• bolder in reframing and reinterpreting global environmental change as a social
problem;
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• better at infusing social science insights into real-world problem-solving;
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• bigger in terms of having more social scientists to focus on global o
environmental change; and
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• different in the way it thinks about and does research that helps meet the l
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vexing sustainability challenges faced today.

World Social Science Report 2013: Changing Global Environments was prepared by S Report
the International Social Science Council and is co-published with the Organisation o
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and UNESCO.
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or • Introduction: Social sciences in a changing global environment a
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R • Key messages and recommendations: Global environmental change changes everything l
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th • The complexity and urgency of global environmental change and social transformation S
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t o • Social science capacity in global environmental change research c
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e • The consequences of global environmental change for society i
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Co • Conditions and visions for change and sense-making in a rapidly changing world n
• The responsibilities and ethical challenges in tackling global environmental change
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• New approaches to governance and decision-making
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Changing Global Environments
• Contributions from International Social Science Council members, programmes and partners

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The Report is available at e
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www.oecd-ilibrary.org
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264203419-en
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ww.unesco.org/publishing t
http://publishing.unesco.org/details.aspx?&Code_Livre=4996
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United Nations
Sciences Sector Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization
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Cultural Organization
wssr_report_2013_31mm_couv.indd 1 08/11/2013 15:12

UNESCO
Publishing
United Nations
Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization
World
Social
Science
Report
2013
Changing Global Environments
The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this publication do
not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the ISSC or UNESCO
concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area, or of its authorities, or
concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
The World Social Science Report 2013 editorial team is responsible for the choice of articles,
the overall presentation and the conclusions. Each author is responsible for the facts con-
tained in his/her article and the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily
those of the ISSC or UNESCO and do not commit either organisation.
doi :10.1787/9789264203419-en
OECD
ISBN 978-92-64-20340-2 (print)
ISBN 978-92-64-20341-9 (PDF)
UNESCO
ISBN 978-92-3-104254-6 (PDF and Print)
Photo credits: Cover © Photographer, Dirk Vermeirre
You Can Buy My Heart and My Soul, 2006 by Andries Botha
Published jointly by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 7, place de Fontenoy,
75352 Paris 07 sp, France, the International Social Science Council (ISSC), UNESCO House, 1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris
Cedex 15, France and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2, rue André Pascal, 75775
Paris Cedex 16, France
First edition, 2013: © ISSC, UNESCO 2013
Graphic design: Corinne Hayworth and OECD
Cover design: Corinne Hayworth
This report should be cited as follows: ISSC and UNESCO (2013), World Social Science Report 2013, Changing Global
Environments, OECD Publishing and UNESCO Publishing, Paris
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Preface
by
Irina Bokova
The World Social Science Report captures a world undergoing deep change, rocked by
multiple crises, including in the environment. It builds on the previous World Social Science
Report, published in 2010, which addressed the challenge of knowledge divides in the social
sciences. On this foundation, the present report tackles the key theme of “Changing Global
Environments”. Like its predecessor, the new report highlights knowledge divides – not
just within the sciences, but also between the sciences and the social transformations
required to achieve sustainable development. The gap between what we know about the
interconnectedness and fragility of our planetary system and what we are actually doing
about it is alarming. And it is deepening.
Just as divided knowledge undermines the solidarity of humanity, so current
environmental challenges – if inadequately understood and inappropriately managed –
can impede achievement of the internationally agreed development goals, through their
negative impacts on poverty eradication and social inclusion as well as on realisation of
human rights for all. The major role of environmental change in shaping migration patterns
is just one of the key linkages that need to be understood and managed in this regard –
recognising both the potential contribution of voluntary migration to adaptation and its
potentially negative impacts if not set within appropriate policy frameworks, as the UN
Global Migration Group stated in 2011.
It was the geologists who first proposed to call our current age the “Anthropocene” – an
age in which human activity is the major force shaping the planetary system. With roots
in scientific understanding, the idea is essentially social and human. At its core, it is a call
to action, to better understand the world, to choose the future we want and to shape global
dynamics in this direction.
This World Social Science Report examines the social dynamics of the Anthropocene
and provides an overall vision to make sense of it. Environmental issues must no longer be
seen as peripheral or impacting externally on societies. Quite the contrary, environmental
change is interconnected with a multitude of other crises, risks and vulnerabilities
which confront every society today. These must be understood together in order to be
addressed together. The social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable
development are a single agenda. Water, forests, cities, agriculture, transport, housing,
energy – in each of these processes of contemporary society, aspects of the environment
are intertwined with human values, beliefs and behaviour. We shape our environment as
it shapes us.
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To move forward, we need scientific approaches that overcome barriers between
disciplines and methods. This World Social Science Report meets this imperative and builds
movement towards more integrated knowledge systems – towards what is sometimes
called “sustainability science”. It reviews trends and their consequences, the conditions
for change in social practices and interpretations, along with responsibilities and ethics,
decision-making and governance issues. The report also shows how much more remains
to be done, especially to ensure equitable global participation in the creation and use of
knowledge.
Action to address global environmental change requires strong, dynamic and wide-
ranging contributions from across the social sciences – to mitigate negative phenomena,
to adapt to others, and, more generally, to enhance social resilience in the face of uncertain
pressures. Technological, financial or economic solutions are not enough. Values, beliefs
and behaviours are essential foundations for shaping greater sustainability. This is also
why the humanities are so important, alongside the social sciences, to help us imagine the
shape of a more sustainable future.
Knowledge is vital for effective action – but for this, we must more tightly link science,
policy and society and integrate scientific understanding with action. Ultimately, achieving
sustainable development is a political challenge that involves making fundamental
choices about how we understand ourselves and the world we wish to inhabit and leave
for future generations. The social sciences have an important contribution to make in
supporting positive social transformations. This requires moving beyond the obstacles
of vested interests, the politicisation of science, and entrenched habits of thought and
behaviour.
This is why the World Social Science Report is so important – to understand changing
global environments and to formulate stronger policies in response. This is especially
important now, as the international community shapes a new sustainable development
agenda to follow 2015.
Linking knowledge to action is the objective of UNESCO’s intergovernmental
Management of Social Transformations (MOST) programme, which has made the social
dimensions of global environmental change one of its two thematic pillars, along with
social inclusion. In supporting this World Social Science Report, MOST has taken forward
a core objective – to mobilise social science for social change that is conducive to
sustainable development. Strengthening the knowledge base without applying it would
not be enough – which is why UNESCO’s activities under MOST also focus on bringing
together experts and policymakers to develop shared, scientifically-informed and
politically relevant agendas.
This report is the result of strong collaboration with the International Social Science
Council on global environmental change, for which I am deeply grateful. It also reflects
a new partnership with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD), which, as co-publisher, will take our messages to audiences across the world. I
welcome this opportunity for UNESCO and the OECD to work together to achieve common
objectives.
At a time when the world is seeking a new vision of sustainable development,
the World Social Science Report must be required reading – for scientists, policymakers,
activists, and all concerned citizens. To move forward, we must rally around a new
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vision of global environmental change as a core part of the crises facing the world today.
Poverty and environmental issues are integral to the sustainability challenge that must
be addressed – including through a new international sustainable development agenda.
This agenda must simultaneously protect human well-being and life-supporting
ecosystems in ways that are socially inclusive and equitable. This is our responsibility
and our aspiration.
Irina Bokova
Director-General of UNESCO
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Preface
A lighter carbon footprint, a greener world
by
Olive Shisana
As one of the most pressing of today’s global environmental problems, climate change
presents a complex and controversial challenge to industrialised and emerging economies.
Climate change is a recent concern, but has become one of the most critical issues for the
current generation. Since the rio Earth Summit in 1992, it has evoked a strong response
at both the community and governmental levels. Evidence of climate change is abundant,
yet a degree of denial persists at the community and government levels, and in many
countries, about its causes and consequences. Sceptics question whether climate change
results primarily from human activity, believing instead that it results only from natural
events independent of a human-caused carbon footprint.
Despite these doubts, a new and independent assessment of the evidence by Berkeley
Earth led to a series of papers in the period 2010 to 2013 that systematically addressed each
of the five foremost concerns expressed by climate change sceptics, and concluded that
they did not unduly bias the record (Berkeley Earth, 2013).
Berkeley Earth confirmed what previous studies had claimed: planet Earth is
warming. The global mean land temperature had increased by 0.911 ºC since the 1950s,
which is consistent with the findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) and with other studies. The scientific community has now achieved
broad consensus regarding the reality and threats of climate change (Frumkin et al.,
2008). The major cause of climate change is understood as the emission of greenhouse
gases, which trap the sun’s heat within the Earth’s atmosphere and lead to increases
in global land and ocean surface temperatures. Though greenhouse gas emissions have
many sources, the major area of concern is the burning of fossil fuels. This happens
predominantly in the North, though China and India’s recent industrial development
has contributed significantly.
Climate change presents many complex problems, ranging from increased
morbidity caused by excess heat to the spread of infectious diseases and to ethical
concerns, because climate-change-related policy could limit economic development in
both emerging economies and resource-poor nations. Perhaps of greatest concern is
the reality that while high-income nations in the North are the leading contributors
to climate change, its effects disproportionately impact middle- and low-income
nations in the South. This creates the challenge of finding a sustainable path towards
development. High-income nations, having already developed, have the infrastructure
to withstand and the means to respond to the many issues related to climate change:
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higher temperatures, extreme weather events, floods and droughts, sea level rise,
infectious diseases, and a variety of other pertinent issues.
Increases in average and extreme temperatures, higher sea surface temperatures,
rising sea levels, and the growing frequency and intensity of extreme weather, all present
nations with complex logistical, social and political problems. Still, it was not until the
1980s that the broader scientific community began to address the issue of climate change.
The first significant international effort to address the issue took place in 1992 with the
signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which
has 194 signatories to date, including the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, the
United States. A lack of substantial progress following the UNFCCC led to a series of efforts,
including the Berlin Mandate in 1995 and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which called for a
5.2% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels from industrialised countries
by 2012. Unfortunately in 2001, the United States rejected the Kyoto Protocol. But in 2009
world leaders, including US President Barack Obama, negotiated the Copenhagen Accord.
This called for a long-term goal of limiting increases in average land temperature to 2 ºC. To
date, many targets and objectives set forth in the Kyoto Protocol and Copenhagen Accord
remain unmet, and nations seem to lack the social and political movements needed to
force their leaderships to address climate change adequately.
One of the major challenges to addressing global climate change is that its primary
cause, for better or for worse, remains linked to current approaches to and patterns of
economic development. Fossil fuels, specifically coal, natural gas and oil, are used for
cooking, for cooling and heating households and workplaces, for transportation, and for
industrial development (EPA, 2013). This means that essential activities necessary in the
development of any nation remain highly dependent on the increased burning of fossil
fuels. These activities comprise an unsustainable model of economic development that
originates in the North and has set a trend for the wider world.
However, the recent global financial and economic crises seem to have shifted the
North–South balance in carbon emissions, albeit slightly. For example, carbon emissions
grew in the EU countries by only 2.2% after the financial crisis, and by 4.1% in the United
States and 5.5% in the russian Federation. These rates of growth are now lower than those
of China, which increased by 10.4%, and India, which grew by 9.4% (Peters et al, 2012).
Public perceptions of climate change seem to be connected to levels of economic
development. Evidence generated by a study of 46 countries suggests that there is a negative
association between public concern for global warming and gross domestic product. In
addition, there is a negative association between per capita carbon dioxide emissions
and public concern for global warming (Sandvik, 2008). This suggests that poor people are
more concerned about the effects of climate change than people in affluent societies. Their
concerns are warranted, as a study published in Eco Health demonstrated that morbidity
and mortality associated with climate change disproportionately impact resource-poor
nations, those least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions (Patz, Gibbs and Foley, 2007).
Popular discourse in the South tends to view a call for reduction of greenhouse gas
emissions as placing limitations on development at a time when the South is rising out
of poverty and beginning to enjoy similar socio-economic benefits to those that the North
continues to experience. Arguments for allowing the South to pollute until it achieves the
same level of economic development as the North are common, yet they are also oblivious
to the obvious consequences of this race to the bottom. While it is true that emerging
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