RESCUE Launching Conference - interviews with participants

Dr. Heide Hackmann, Secretary-General of the International Social Science Council (ISSC), located in France

Q: As Secretary General of the International Social Science Council, what are the key messages you want to deliver to RESCUE and the Working Group "Towards a revolution in eductation and capacity building"?

A: I would say, two key messages. The first would be that as Forward Look RESCUE is an European initiative, it has to be placed in an international context.

My experience from the International Social Science Council is that non-European regions represented in the Council are often surprised that European Science doesn’t speak as one voice. I think this (Forward Look RESCUE) is an opportunity for the European scientific community to make its statement on a particularly important issue and it can serve as a model for other regions. Europe as a knowledge region has to assume and recognize its responsibility towards the rest of the world and towards particularly less well resourced parts of the world and developing countries where knowledge systems are less well resourced.

My second, much more practical message is: keep it concrete. We have been talking about these things for a long time, when are we going to act? When are we going to make real changes? Let’s make sure that we will not have these same conversations in the next ten years.

Prof. Mercedes Pardo Buendía, Leader of the "Sociology of Climate Change and Sustainable Development" Research Group, Department of Political Science and Sociology, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Q: What made you decide to get involved with the RESCUE initiative?

A: I decided to get involved for both the interdisciplinarity and the societal aspects of the initiative regarding Global Change. I also believe that the differences between societies are key issues to be taken into account when dealing with Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges. In the case of Europe, the Mediterranean societies and the Spanish society in particular represent the “South of the North”, not only geographically but also metaphorically  speaking, with many relevant differences to consider in order to success in the Responses.

Q: You are contributing to the topical session “New, emerging and neglected scientific questions in RESCUE remit”. What do you see as the greatest challenges in this topic?

A: I think the inclusion of social sciences analysis and its perspectives, as well as the need for real interdisciplinarity connecting theories and methodologies are great challenges. In addition, I believe the governance of Global Change and its architecture are still neglected research areas. Finally, research on the differences among European societies regarding Global Change is very much needed.

Dr. Cecilia Lundholm, member of the "knowledge management, learning and social networks in social-ecological systems" research group, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden

Q: Are environmental education and questions related to learning about sustainability issues taken into account in European global change research? In your opinion, do they get enough attention in the respective science communities?

A: There are many aspects of knowledge and education that need to be addressed, that do not currently get enough attention. For example the role of science in decision-making - how is the IPCC and other reports used? What knowledge do politicians possess - and what is the knowledge of the public? Are they much different, and in what sense? We also need to address values of citizens and politicians as we are faced with social dilemmas; how can we collectively respond adequately and quickly?

Prof. Verena Winiwarter, Professor for Environmental History, Institute of Social Ecology, University of Klagenfurt, Austria

Q: What made you decide to get involved in Forward Look RESCUE?

A: Global Change research in Europe can be unique because we have historical documents available (none of these are available in the US) to reconstruct the long human history of changing their environment. I believe we can only shape the future if we understand the past, because we feald with historical legacies in most European ecosystems. We also want to know how humans have dealt with nature in the past to offer an array of possible future patterns of interaction. What has been possible in the past, might be possible in the future.

I also fully agree that a revolution in education is necessary as part of the measures to deal with Global Change. I therefore joined the Working Group dealing with this topic. My institution (IFF) - has just turned 30, but our experience in interdisciplinary training and learning is unknown to a wider audience. I hope I can offer something valuable here.

Q: As professor of environmental history, what do you see as the biggest changes in the global environmental change research debates and discourses during the last decades?

A: My impression is that one important stepping stone was the broadening of the issue from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" to "Global Change". While focus was perhaps lost, the community does now have an understanding of the dimension of the problem, which comprises dozens of factors and dozens of feedback loops. Within IPCC, the growing importance of social sciences is noteworthy, and there is some real integration, not just booking-binder synthesis. RESCUE takes this trend one step further, by making public involvement and education prime targets. Environmental history has a lot to offer to this debate, but I was the only environmental historian invited, and I was invited for a different topic (education).

Within the Dahlem 2005 workshop group "Integrated History and future Of People on Earth" (IHOPE), led by Robert Costanza, Lisa Graumlich and others, a lot of ground has been covered in terms of how to integrate different timescales and disciplines. While I am not at all supportive of the framing the group selected ("Sustainability or Collapse"), I was astonished not to see more connection between RESCUE and IHOPE, because both methodically and conceptually, the group tried to achieve something in line with the goals of RESCUE.

Q: Is history repeating itself when it comes to trying to increase the interdisciplinarity in global change research?

A: To some extent, my reference to an already existing group implies a positive answer to this question. Interdisciplinarity is a mean, not an end. As long as it remains to be discussed as an end, the discussion is flawed. We need to solve a problem. Disciplinary approaches to a problem always reconfigure the problem so part of it can be solved within the given discipline, and the rest is discarded (e.g. considered as less urgent, less important). An interdisciplinary approach breaks the problem-constructing constraints of discplines. Ideally, an interdiscplinary group can formulate a new question (one which comes much closer to the problem), which none of the disciplines could solve on their own. Then collaboration becomes necessary.

By involving lay people (concerned citizens, stakeholders) into the phase of defining the question/framing the problem, unproductive alliances within supposedly interdisciplinary teams to get back to the level of multidisciplinarity, by simply trying to add up blocks which then do not fit and do not address the problem, can be broken. This happens, because it is easier. Real interdisciplinarity needs both courage and trust in others, and both need time to develop, time which is often considered too precious, due to e.g. publication pressures. We call the involvement of stakeholders "transdisciplinarity". I think only such processes can create the degree of public acceptance for harsh measures which will be needed in Global Change policies. Austrian sustainability research funded by the ministry of science has been done in a transdisciplinary way over the past 15 years, with excellent results in terms of both content and acceptance.