Social sciences have so much more to bring to climate studies in forest research: a French case study
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OPINION PAPER
Social sciences have so much more to bring to climate studies in forest research: a French case study Timothée Fouqueray 1
&
Nathalie Frascaria-Lacoste 1
Received: 10 June 2020 / Accepted: 23 July 2020 # INRAE and Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract & Key message Faced with wicked problems such as climate change, managers of complex forest social-ecological systems require more than experimental sciences alone. Yet, mitigation and adaptation studies underuse social sciences in forest research, as shown here with the French case study. Therefore, we stress the value of social sciences for forest researchers, and extend this reflection to research funding bodies, forest authorities, foresters, and society at large. We identify training and publications as the main levers for more holistic forest research, and posit that with short-, mid-, and long-term changes, social sciences can complement (not replace) experimental sciences in climate studies led by forest researchers. Keywords Climate change . Forest sciences . Social sciences . Interdisciplinarity . Research orientation . Funding
1 Introduction Climate change threatens the current living conditions of most living creatures, including humans (Diaz et al. 2019). Research efforts have intensified on the topic (Haunschild et al. 2016), highlighting how human-induced climate upheaval, along with global changes such as habitat loss and degradation, alters the trajectories of ecosystems worldwide. The mitigation of carbon emissions and adaptation to the many consequences of climate change (hereinafter “adaptation”) are now acknowledged as complementary ways to address this issue. Climate studies call on a wide array of disciplinary approaches to tackle the intrinsic complexity of the issues raised by climate
Handling Editor: Erwin Dreyer Contribution of the co-authors TF conceived, designed, and wrote the paper and figures; NF made additional contributions and edited the manuscript. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13595-020-00989-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Timothée Fouqueray [email protected] 1
Ecologie, Systématique, Evolution, AgroParisTech, CNRS, University Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, 91405 Orsay, France
change. The factors influencing successful mitigation and adaptation range from individual adaptive behaviors (Luthe and Wyss 2015) and collective organization (Jacobs et al. 2015) to economic strategies (e.g., Brèteau-Amores et al. 2019), to name but a few. Regarding adaptation, disciplinary insights from the social sciences (such as psychology, sociology, human geography, but also economics; for a detailed understanding of the social sciences, see Moon and Blackman 2014) are necessary to produce general knowledge of a “science of adaptation” (Swart et al. 2014), which currently remains focused on experimental sciences. At the same time, many problem-solving authors
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