The connection between social justice and climate mitigation runs throughout the report. “People are starting to realize how serious the climate crisis is, and that ways of addressing the challenges of the climate crisis also tend to improve energy security, justice, social concerns, there are a lot of win-wins and co-benefits,” says Catherine Mitchell, professor of energy policy at the University of Exeter and one of the two lead authors coordinating the policy chapter.
Social scientists hoping to make further
inroads not only into the IPCC process but also into policymaking have a chicken-and-egg problem, according to Dana Fisher, director of the Society and Environment Program at the University of Maryland, author of Chapter 13. Fisher’s research focuses on the impact that activism has had on climate policymaking. “ We don’t have the funding to support the kind of large-scale research that allows you to have high confidence in your results,” she says, which limits the amount of social science research that can be us in the report.
Less than 1% of climate research funding from 1990 to 2018 went to the social sciences, including political science, sociology, and economics. This despite the fact that even physical scientists themselves agree that climate inaction is unlikely to be solv by more scientific evidence.
“In the 1980s, we believ in the information deficit model of social change and that if we could just give policymakers information, they content for each stage of the buyer journey would do the right thing,” says atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, senior scientist for Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy. “And now we see that it’s not really about information deficits, it’s about power relations and people who want to maintain economic and political power.”
This is not to say that there is no longer a ne for weather models
a better understanding of various the centre undertake their scheduled aspects of climate science. But what this report makes abundantly clear is that action on climate is not limit by a lack of scientific knowlge or technological options, but by entrench power structures and a lack of political will. To america email address this problem effectively and act in time to avoid the worst impacts of warming, social scientists agree: we will ne more than climate models.