The wisdom of crowds

When was the last time you tried to convince your partner or a friend to do something for you? Washing the dishes, say — something you have to do, but you'd rather put off until later. The negotiation probably involved some coaxing and complementing, and then possibly some complaining or coercion. That's quite a lot of diplomacy for a situation involving two people and a minor task. Now imagine groups of hundreds of people trying to get thousands of people to do what they want them to. It's head-spinning stuff, but it's what the world is up against when it comes to dealing with climate change.

What's more, scientists who spend their time measuring the rate of ice melting in the Arctic or working out the chemistry of storing carbon underground aren't likely to solve this thorny problem. Luckily, there is a field of study that has at its heart human activity and social structure — why and how we do what we do. That discipline is sociology.

"Climate change is the ultimate collective-action problem," says Steven Brechin, a sociologist at Syracuse University in New York. "How do you get people to agree in the short term to solutions for a long-term problem?" The answer, like the problem, has to be wide-ranging and global, says Jeffrey Broadbent of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who also studies how societies affect their environments. "Its only solution lies in a level of global cooperation that humanity has never seen before."
In short supply

Broadbent is just starting to investigate what factors contribute to this kind of cooperation at the national level. He has recently begun a project, called Comparing Climate Change Policy Networks, that aims to find out how information about climate change enters a particular country's network of interested parties and what happens to it once it's found its way to organizations and governments.

Broadbent is now one of a band of sociologists that has begun to turn the discipline's tools towards climate change. In May last year, over 30 sociologists met at the US National Science Foundation's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, to discuss what sociology is already contributing to climate change research and what questions sociologists need to be answering next. "Purely technological 'fixes'", concluded the meeting report, "will not be sufficient to mitigate or successfully adapt to climate change."

But this can-do attitude hasn't always been in evidence. "There are a lot of valuable contributions that could be made, and very few of them have been made," says Paul Stern, director of the US National Academies Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change. That's partly for financial reasons: funding from the US Global Change Research Program (GCRP, formerly the Climate Change Science Program) for research on the 'human dimensions' of climate change has actually fallen in the last 20 years. In 1992, three per cent of funding from the GCRP was spent on human dimensions research, including social science, and now this figure has dropped to less than two per cent. Diana Liverman, co-director of the Institute for Environment and Society at the University of Arizona in Tucson and director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, agrees with Stern: "Funding for social-science approaches to climate change has been pathetic given the size of the research challenge we're facing."

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