Integrating Science and Policy: Vulnerability and Resilience in Global Environmental Change

As progress towards a greater knowledge in sustainability science continues, the question of how better to integrate scientific progress with actual decisions made by practitioners remains paramount. This book aims to help close the gap between science and practice. Based on a two year collaborative project between Harvard and Clark Universities, the book takes as its focus the vulnerability and resilience of people around the world to the effects of environmental change, a mature area of research in which one might expect the gap between science and policy/practice to have been extensively bridged.

Integrating Science and Policy presents analysis of past studies, interviews conducted with the producers and users of scientific knowledge, and case studies performed by leading scholars across a spectrum of international settings and political systems. Crucially, the authors identify new directions and tools for closing the gap between science and policy across a range of situations and societies. The result is an illuminating collection of studies and analyses that suggest to researchers, students, practitioners, and policy-makers alike how best to ensure that high quality environmental research informs good environmental policy and practice.

Roger Kasperson is Research Professor at Clark University and a Visiting Scholar at START in Washington, DC. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Risk Analysis. He has served on numerous committees of the US National Research Council. He was a former Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Mimi Berberian is a Senior Staff Associate at the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University. She has participated with researchers in various studies of natural and technological hazards, risk assessment and risk management, and global environmental change. She has a long experience in editing and has facilitated the preparation of numerous research results for publication as journal articles and books. Among those published are Equity Issues in Radioactive Waste Management, Climate Impact Assessment, and Social Contours of Risk.