Scientists behind the climate research for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports have stressed the need for future models to incorporate predictions of human behaviour if they are to steer adaptation and mitigation efforts in the most beneficial directions.

Achieving this will, however, need an unprecedented degree of international and cross-disciplinary cooperation, as well as coordinated government funding in keeping with the significance of the challenge, explained Professor Kevin Noone, Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), to Science and Public Affairs.

His comments came in the wake of the second instalment of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. This predicts a bleak future for life on the planet if average temperatures rise more than 2°C. While adaptation will be required everywhere, the report explains that the poorer countries, at most risk from the effects of climate change, will have the greater need for adaptation.

Predicting effects of adaptation

The IGBP, an international network of environmental scientists, is keen that adaptation strategies should reduce rather than add to the stress on the environment. This, they say, requires new evaluation tools that can take account of human behaviour and predict the effects of various policy and economic options. ‘Adaptation always involves trade-offs. The question is what level of justice and equity we want to build into how we adapt,’ said Professor Noone.

Such tools would rely on input from social scientists, economists and politicians. They would integrate this input with existing environmental models to provide decision support for adaptation. ‘The infrastructure to do this is there already,’ Professor Noone said, referring to the example of the international Earth Systems Science Partnership of which IGBP is a member. But creating such tools still presents a research challenge and a cultural one, because of the variety of vocabularies, approaches and models across the disciplines.

Psychological challenge

It is also important that the models take account of the real drivers of pro-social, individual human behaviour, according to Andrew Dobson, professor of politics at Keele University. Documented social science research shows that people’s urge to act in the common good can be undermined by ‘business as usual’ fixes such as taxes and technology pushes. If it doesn’t take account of such research, the model could be less successful in revealing the best route forward, he said.

More pressingly, there is also a financial challenge. ‘The available funding is not sufficient, not by a long shot,’ said Professor Noone. ‘The problem is that [the work] does not fit neatly into funding categories. We work across disciplines and national boundaries. If we are to develop sustainable adaptation systems, we need information and knowledge that cannot be produced by any individual country or within any one discipline of research.’

Vanessa Spedding is the Shorts Editor