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Introduction
Scientists and policy makers increasingly recognize global warming and
other aspects of climate change as significant threats to the future of Earth’s
ecosystems and to human well-being. If left unchecked, climate change
could lead to worsening consequences, including faster rising sea levels;
more floods, storms, fires, and waterborne and vector-borne diseases; heat-
related illness; crop failures; shifting ecosystems; and environmental deg-
radation. Although scientists still disagree in their estimates of the timing
and magnitude of particular consequences, there is widespread agreement
that the risks are sufficiently serious to warrant action to reduce the net
future human influence on climate (mitigation) and to promote successful
adaptation to the consequences of climate change that cannot be avoided
(National Research Council, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c; U.S. Global Change
Research Program, 2009b).
Responding to climate change requires an expansion of the range of
scientific work on climate change. This is a “new era of climate change
research” (National Research Council, 2010b:4), one that requires a
much stronger emphasis than previously on the understanding of human-
environment systems and a much greater integration of the social and
behavioral sciences with the other sciences concerned with climate change.
Much of the expanded research agenda is directed to use-inspired funda-
mental research (Stokes, 1997) that can support effective human responses
to climate change, including efforts to limit its magnitude and to adapt to
its consequences.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, understanding the need for
these kinds of research and the need for policy makers at the national level
1
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2 FACILITATING CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSES
to entrain the behavioral and social sciences in addressing the challenges
of global climate change, called on the National Research Council (NRC)
to organize two workshops in Washington, DC, to showcase some of the
decision-relevant contributions that these sciences have already made and
can advance with future efforts. The Panel on Addressing the Challenges
of Climate Change Through the Behavioral and Social Sciences was formed
to organize the workshops under the auspices of the NRC’s Committee on
the Human Dimensions of Global Change. The workshops were held on
December 3-4, 2009, and April 8-9, 2010.
The panel was asked to organize workshops in two broad areas in
which insufficient attention has been paid to the potential contributions
of behavioral and social sciences: (1) mitigation (behavioral elements of a
strategy to reduce the net future human influence on climate) and (2) adap-
tation (behavioral and social determinants of societal capacity to minimize
the damage from climate changes that are not avoided). The workshops
were intended to demonstrate the contributions that the behavioral and
social sciences can make for more effective responses to climate change. It
was also intended that the workshops would lay the foundation for further
inquiries.
The panel developed and considered a number of topical areas for
discussion before settling on the agendas, topics, and invited presenters for
the two workshops. There are fairly large and well-developed social and
behavioral science literatures on several aspects of climate change mitiga-
tion, and not all of them could be covered in a two-day workshop. We
decided to focus on a few issues we thought would be particularly relevant
to current policy debates. One of the issues is public understanding of
climate change—a topic that is important both for mitigation and adapta-
tion. We believed that a scientific examination of how nonscientists think
about climate change could help explain shifts in public opinion and levels
of public support for climate policies and could be useful for improving
public understanding and for educating the next generation of citizens on
the topic. We devoted a half-day session to this topic.
We organized additional half-day sessions around three other topics:
(1) the potential for mitigating climate change through household action,
(2) public acceptance of energy technologies, and organizational change,
and (3) the “greening” of business. In each session, presenters reported on
the knowledge base on the topic, and invited discussants and other partici-
pants considered the implications of the findings for policy choices.
The workshop on adaptation to climate change took a different form
because of the different state of social and behavioral science knowledge.
Multidisciplinary research on adaptation to natural climate variations has
been conducted for decades at a relatively low level of intensity. However,
the issue of adaptation to anthropogenic climate change has only relatively
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INTRODUCTION
recently become a major one on research and policy agendas. Thus, the re-
search literature and agenda are less well defined and more dispersed across
several disciplines and related fields than those on mitigation.
To plan the adaptation workshop, we began by contacting a number
of policy makers in federal agencies who have been working with decision
makers at federal, state, and local levels who are confronted with the need
to take climate change into account in their work. We asked them what
they would like to learn from research on adaptation and, with that input,
we developed a list of key questions about climate change adaptation to
pose to social and behavioral scientists. We invited researchers who had
studied topics that we believed could shed light on these questions and
who had directly examined multiple cases of adaptation. We asked them to
report on what they had learned, and panel members volunteered to listen
to these presentations and report at the end of the workshop on what they
had heard during the workshop that might answer the decision makers’
questions.
The workshops brought together leading researchers from across the
behavioral and social sciences whose expertise and research can help ad-
dress timely questions about responding to climate change. The presenta-
tions emphasized current research, some of it not yet published at the time it
was presented. We found the discussions enlightening and stimulating, and
we believe that, even in this written summary form, they will be useful to
readers who are interested in the latest knowledge about human responses
to climate change. The workshop material concretely illustrates some of the
ways the behavioral and social sciences can contribute to the new era of
climate research called for in the report Advancing the Science of Climate
Change (National Research Council, 2010b). It also shows how these sci-
ences can help in addressing the challenges of climate change.
This report does not present any conclusions, lessons, or the like as
consensus statements by the panel. Although individual members of the
panel drew conclusions from the workshops, some of which are mentioned
in the report, it was not the purpose of these workshops to draw overall
conclusions. Readers will have to do that for themselves.
It is important to be specific about the nature of this report, which
documents the information presented in the workshop presentations and
discussions. Its purpose is to lay out the key ideas that emerged from the
workshops and should be viewed as an initial step in examining the re-
search and applying it in specific policy circumstances. The report is con-
fined to the material presented by the workshop speakers and participants.
Neither of the workshops nor this summary is intended as a comprehensive
review of what is known, although each generally reflects of the literature.
The presentations and discussions were limited by the time available for
the workshops.
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4 FACILITATING CLIMATE CHANGE RESPONSES
Although this report was prepared by the panel, it does not represent
a consensus of the panel. Rather, the report summarizes views expressed
by workshop participants, and the panel is responsible only for its overall
quality and accuracy as a record of what transpired at the workshops.
PLAN OF THE REPORT
The structure of this report reflects the organization of the two work-
shops. Part I summarizes the December 2009 workshop on public under-
standing and mitigation of climate change. Part II summarizes the April
2010 workshop on adaptation to climate change. Appendix A presents the
agenda and list of participants of the December 2009 workshop, and Ap-
pendix B does the same for the April 2010 workshop. Appendix C presents
biographical sketches of the panel members and staff.
