Launch of the World Social Science Report 2013: Changing Global Environments

King’s College London, in collaboration with the International Social Science Council in Paris and the Social and Human Science Sector at UNESCO, is pleased to invite you to the UK launch of the World Social Science Report 2013 taking place in London 11 June 2014.

Global environmental change is about people. The World Social Science Report 2013, prepared by the International Social Science Council and co-published with UNESCO and the OECD, argues that social science needs to be at the heart of understanding and responding to global challenges such as climate change, pollution, resource limits and planetary boundaries to economic growth.

Drawing on contributions from 150 scholars from around the world, the report issues an urgent call to the international social science community to collaborate more effectively with each other, with colleagues from other fields of science, and with users of research to deliver solutions-oriented knowledge for today’s most pressing environmental problems. It calls for a transformative social science that is:

• bolder in reframing and reinterpreting global environmental change as a social problem
• better at infusing social science insights into real-world problem-solving
• bigger in terms of having more social scientists to focus on global environmental change
• different in the way it thinks about and does research

The launch will gather distinguished social science and climate change researchers to present and discuss with each other and the audience the key messages of the report and possible policy implications.

Speakers

• Dr Heide Hackman, Executive Director, International Social Science Council http://www.worldsocialscience.org/about/the-secretariat/
• Professor Frans Berkhout, Interim Director, Future Earth and King's College London http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/geography/people/academic/berkhout/index.aspx
  
• John Crowley, Sector for Social and Human Sciences, UNESCO
• Professor John Urry Lancaster University http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/profiles/john-urry
  
• Professor Bronwyn Parry, King's College London http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/departments/sshm/people/academic/Professor-Bronwyn-Parry.aspx
  
• Dr. Lee Davies, Evidence Lead for Resource Efficiency, Principal Social Scientist, Resource, Atmosphere and Sustainability, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
• Ilmi Granoff, Senior Research Fellow, Green growth team leader, Overseas Development Institute, London http://www.odi.org.uk/about/staff/1245-ilmi-granoff

Chaired by Professor Denise Lievesley, Head of the School of Social Science and Public Policy, King’s College London

World Social Science Report 2013: www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/world-social-science-report-2013_9789264203419-en

www.worldsocialscience.org