The Role of Science in the 21st Century

Tande Chilenge

Taking place after the IHDP Open Meeting 2009’s first day of parallel sessions, the round table, “Addressing the Social Challenges of Global Change – the Role of Science in the 21st Century”, provided a platform for participants and interested members of the public to exchange views on the role of science in effectively meeting the challenges laid out by the scientific agenda of the 7th Open Meeting.

Whether it is about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, changing unsustainable resource management or addressing systemic changes in terms of energy or production and consumption patterns, human actions lie at the heart of all these phenomena. In order to address these challenges effectively, a better understanding of both the sources of human actions as well as the environments that enable and secure the transformation of good intent into action seems to be more crucial than ever before. This situation is both a great challenge and opportunity for the human dimensions community and raises numerous questions. How will the human dimensions community respond effectively to the raising demand for its science? What are the most promising areas for cutting-edge social science contributions to understanding global change? How should we organise the human dimensions community to maximise progress in this effort? The Open Meeting was an apt occasion at which to discuss such pertinent questions in the form of a public debate. In a crowed Plenary Hall, this round table initiated a reflection on the current role of human dimensions research. James Painter of BBC World Service and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford, served as moderator for what turned out to be one of the best attended round tables of the conference. The session addressed the unmet potential of such research to play an even stronger role in driving agendas, both global and local, to successfully address the social challenges of global change and succeeded in setting the stage for the later days of the conference. The speakers were: Oran R. Young, University of California, Santa Barbara, and, IHDP Scientific Committee Chair; Frieder Meyer-Krahmer, State Secretary of the BMBF, Germany; Liu Yanhua, Vice-Minister for Science and Technology, China; Katrina Brown, University of East-Anglia, UK; Carlo Jaeger, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany and IHDP Scientific Committee Member; Xuemei Bai, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Australia; James L. Buizer, Arizona State University, USA; Gernot Klepper, Kiel Institute of World Economics, Germany, and IHDP, Scientific Committee Member.