Creating a more sustainable world with social science

As climate change is, fundamentally, a human-caused problem, an understanding of human behaviour as well as the social, economic and political factors contributing to climate change are of the utmost importance to lead to positive climate action.

Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh is Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, a major research centre which studies the central role of people in social transformations to address how we can live in ways that meet the urgent need for rapid emissions reductions to help tackle climate change.

Professor Jadu Dash is Professor of Remote Sensing at the University of Southampton. His research uses large data sets from satellites and environmental sensors and combines them with social and economic data sets to understand who is affected by climate change, why they’re affected and what can be done to mitigate climate change impacts.

Watch the video below to hear from Lorraine and Jadu on how social science research is helping us to tackle climate change and create a more sustainable world for all.

Video transcript

Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh:

Social science matters because climate change is fundamentally a human caused problem and it is a problem that is going to affect everybody in a myriad of ways.

My name is Lorraine Whitmarsh, I’m a Professor of Environmental Psychology at the University of Bath and Director of CAST, which is the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations.

So, we’re looking at the people bit of how to tackle climate change. How can we change behaviour, change organisations and society to reduce the risks and adapt to a changing climate?

So, a lot of our evidence has centred around what people think and feel about climate change and what they think about climate policies to tackle the issue.

We know that, for example, people are more supportive of measures that would help them to reduce car use, to change their diets, to help them to save energy, but they want the government to help them to do that.

For example, we’ve been working with the UK Government to help develop their public participation plan on climate change, which is seeing an important role for engaging the public in decision making as well as delivery of climate action.

And with local authorities, for example, Cornwall Council, we’ve been helping them to develop measures to enable residents to travel in more sustainable ways through a combination of information and economic incentives.

Professor Jadu Dash:

Social science plays a fundamental role in understanding the impact of climate change, especially when it comes to adaptation and resource management.

Hi, I’m Jadu Dash, Professor in Remote Sensing at the University of Southampton.

So, my research focuses on understanding how climate change and human activities are reshaping our environment. Specifically, we look into issues around food security, how we respond to natural disasters or even emerging environmental threats.

We try to make better use of vast amount of data sets that are available from a range of sources like satellite data, environmental sensors and even our mobile phones.

We combine those data, or environmental information, with social and economic data sets to better understand not what is happening but who is affected by it and why they’re affected.

One of the examples of our work is looking into crop yield in Malawi.

Without getting a clear understanding of who is affected and how, it is impossible to design an effective solution.

So, we often describe our approach as linking people to pixels.

So, satellite data tells us what is happening on the ground, but when we combine that with the information about people lived and who are impacted by that, then that is when it becomes more meaningful and leads on to developing policies.