• Connectivity and Corridors, April 2010
• Climate Change, April 2010
• Conservation Social Science, April 2010

Two of my articles are in the “Conservation Social Science” issue.  The first article was a collaboration with my Smith Fellows cohort, and the second was written by Tim Holland, who did his Masters with Andrew Gonzalez and I.

• Perceived Barriers to Integrating Social Science and Conservation by Helen E. Fox, Caroline Christian, J. Cully Nordby, Oliver R.W. Pergams, Garry D. Peterson, and Christopher R. Pyke
• A Cross-National Analysis of How Economic Inequality Predicts Biodiversity Loss by Tim G. Holland, Garry D. Peterson, and Andrew Gonzalez

Resilience colleagues also have two papers reprinted, the first in the climate change special issue, and the second also in the social science issue

• Identifying Reefs of Hope and Hopeful Actions: Contextualizing Environmental, Ecological, and Social Parameters to Respond Effectively to Climate Change
  T.R. McClanahan, J.E. Cinner, N.A.J. Graham, T.M. Daw, J. Maina, S.M. Stead, A. Wamukota, K. Brown, V. Venus, and N.V.C. Polunin
• Rethinking Community-Based Conservation
  Fikret Berkes

Related posts:

1. WWF seeks conservation social scientist
2. Should climate change research be 90 percent social science?
3. Expansion of social-ecological systems science

“Speaking as a natural scientist,” he said, “I think 90% of research [on global change] will have to be done by the social scientists.”

…Physicists, he told me at the coffee break, can describe climate threats increasingly vividly and can tell decision-makers that technological solutions are out there. But it’s up to social science, he says, to figure out how we bring about massive economic and social transformation on a tight deadline.

Case in point: feeding solar power from the Sahara where it’s plentiful to Europe where it’s highly in demand, one of Schellnhuber’s favorite ideas. “All the technical problems have been solved,” he says, “but it cannot be done.” We don’t have the legal framework, the transboundary agreements, the international will for this mode of energy delivery.

This is where policy experts, economists, and even anthropologists come in. But, he says, “I don’t think the social science community has grasped the scope of the challenge.” Operating on the basic principle that all groups are different, 95% of social science papers are local case studies, not global-scale work, he says. And indeed, there are an awful lot of case studies among this week’s 800 talks. It remains to be seen whether the picture emerging from the conference will be piecemeal or planet-wide.

Related posts:

1. Postdoctoral research opportunity in Climate Change Adaptation
2. Brian Walker’s Research Areas for Resilience Science
3. Conservation Social Science