Because How Would We Understand the World Without It?

When I was in elementary school, the way we studied geography was...not fun. It involved a lot of memorizing: state capitals, rivers and mountains, maybe a famous place from history or two.

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that places and names are just a fraction of what geography is all about. In fact, geography is a social science that explores much more than the points on a map. It is a discipline that asks how? and why? as much as it asks where?

Geography embraces many disciplines across the humanities and sciences: history, demography, anthropology, cartography, climate science, geology, technology, political science, and economics, to name just a few. You could say that the study of geography is about everything that relates to a place.

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Because It Can Help Students Find Their Place in Fighting Climate Change

Universities have the resources to help combat the climate crisis. What’s more, they have a responsibility to their students – who want to take action, but may lack the support they need to do so.

One way universities can do this is to help students use their skills to contribute to university- and community-wide projects. This can create real change, as well as teaching students how to take collaborative action.

In 2019, we started a research project with colleagues at York St John University to find out what students felt about the climate crisis. To begin, we held focus groups with 23 students who had responded to a call for participation posted on social media and around the campus.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

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Because Changing Behavior is Essential to Addressing Climate Change

Scientists across a wide range of disciplines agree that climate change is one of the biggest challenges currently facing our world. Climate change is now recognized as a dire threat to global public health, with a growing awareness of the mental health impacts. The discipline of psychology can contribute in multiple ways to the response to climate change, as described in the American Psychological Association’s recent report Addressing the Climate Crisis: An Action Plan for Psychologists. In this report, APA calls on psychologists to bring their expertise and experience to the fight against climate change and to collaborate with other disciplines and professions to magnify the impact of psychologists’ efforts. Psychologists have roles to play in helping society to mitigate climate change and adapt to it, as well as in building public understanding and attitudes and encouraging social action.

Mitigation, which is aimed at preventing further climate change, may involve the development of new technologies, alternative energy sources, and methods for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere (e.g., large-scale tree planting, carbon dioxide filtering devices) along with new ways of living and working. New mitigation strategies also present untapped possibilities for incorporating psychological science, including the development of energy-saving smart home technologies that are sensitive and intuitive, ensuring ethical deployments of artificial intelligence, and identifying and breaking down the mental barriers to electric vehicle adoption. Psychologists will be essential to rethinking our world, from aiding the transition to remote work, to reshaping communities to encourage more emission free transportation, to helping people transition to plant-based diets. More broadly, psychologists can contribute to policy development and decision-making about climate change to facilitate acceptance and adoption of new technologies, environments, and routines.

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Because Hurricanes Aren’t Going Away Any Time Soon and Schools Must Continue to Function

Natural disasters (such as hurricanes) have a history of impacting some of the most socially vulnerable communities – low income communities and communities of color. While the intensity and quantity of storms will likely increase in the coming years, we still have very little information on the best services and sources that can support schooling, educators, and students during and after natural disasters. My research is working to address this gap by collecting, analyzing, and presenting data on the best ways to assist recovery for some of the most vulnerable populations.      

What have we learned in the last decade?

Across the last decade, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) confirmed 67 Major Disaster Declarations in the United States from hurricanes alone. Each of these declarations impacted communities, schools, educators, and students throughout our nation.  We’ve also learned that 6 of the 10 (60%) costliest hurricanes in our history occurred between 2010 and 2019, costing a total of $393.7 billion.

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Because Collaborating Across Cultures and Beyond Boundaries Leads to Progress on the World’s Biggest Issues

On Sept. 25, 2015 the United Nations (UN) established a historic plan entitled “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” which was agreed upon by the 193 Member States of the UN. The Agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), each one addressing a critical world issue. Many of these, such as climate change, poverty, equal rights and quality education, are directly relevant to the field of psychology. Given the effort addressing the SDGs will require, it is important that psychology itself unite as a science and profession and join with other disciplines in order to reach the 2030 objectives.

How formidable is the challenge we are facing?

Recent data suggest it is extraordinary:

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Because Social Science Equips Us with Tools We Will Need to Face Down the Biggest Issues of Our Time, Including the Growing Global Threat of Climate Change

Our Earth is in crisis. More frequent and severe droughts, rising sea-levels, extreme weather and ecological damage are already here, with more loss and hardship on the horizon.

As a trained engineer and Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change, I depend on science to inform my policy decisions. Social sciences are especially important to my work because they help reveal how climate change is impacting people and communities. This is invaluable insight for policymakers working to make decisions meant to save lives and build more resilient communities.

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Because It Helps Build Resilience in the Face of Disasters

We are dedicated to using social science to improve disaster recovery for those on the margins of society—in particular on the unique needs of children and older adults in times of crisis. Our past work has shed light on how age influences issues of both vulnerability and agency. Uplifting lessons learned is especially important as we continue to face more extreme weather events and a changing climate. 

Recovery needs vary based on age

Children have unique disaster needs because of their age, cognitive abilities, and dependence on adult guardians and caretakers, with older children commonly more affected. Additionally, children tend to experience magnified effects, because they must cope with disaster-related stress during a developmental phase in which their personalities and identities are forming.

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Because We Need to Understand What Will Motivate People to Take Action

I am not a social scientist, and must confess to having little formal classroom training in the disciplines. However, over the course of my career as a geoscientist, I have acquired a profound respect for the value of the social sciences to the Earth sciences. Social science research helps answer questions such as why are some people open to considering scientific evidence that challenges their own deeply-held biases (e.g., about climate change) while others have closed minds. Is it a function of the message? The messenger? Or the recipient? While all of these factors can be important, new social science research has revealed that having a curious and inquiring nature can promote accepting scientific evidence that is at odds with an individual’s opinions—a characteristic that can open a person’s mind to considering new ideas and viewpoints. This research finding along with the scholarship in science communication synthesized in a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides us with the knowledge necessary to dramatically improve how we communicate and offers a roadmap for the kinds of future research we need as online information environments and new fields of science with regulatory, moral, or political implications continue to emerge.

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