From evidence to policy - why so slow?

Guest blog by David Christian Rose, PhD student University of Cambridge, http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/rose/

Devastating floods in southern England, destructive storms in the Philippines, massive wildfires in Australia: just some of the recent events where climate change is believed to have played a significant part. And yet despite the growing realisation amongst policy-makers that climate change is increasing the occurrence of environmental disasters, meaningful policy still lags behind the action required.

So how can we increase the impact of evidence on policy-making, and what lessons might we gain from thinking about this question?

Firstly, we all - climate scientists, conservationists and the public alike – need to understand that policy-making is rarely based purely on scientific evidence, and indeed nor should it be, unless we wish for a technocratic society. We live in a democracy which pays attention to a multitude of  factors. Consequently, we need to think less about producing more and more evidence and expecting that will to lead to policy change, and more about how we can deploy our knowledge in ways that makes it persuasive in combination with these other factors.

So scientists, conservationists, and other environmental campaigners need to present evidence astutely, in awareness and consideration of wider political and societal context. We perhaps even need to gain more understanding of wider issues prominent on government agendas, and learn to frame our evidence and its implications within salient political ideas.

In this context, the production of climate science and its communication to decision-makers has been far from ideal. In climate change negotiations for example, lack of meaningful policy action arises primarily from competing interests, such as justice issues between the global North/South, and not from poor scientific evidence.

Thus, we might question the value of the IPCC in working to increase the certainty of human causation of climate change - from 90% certainty in 2007 to 95% certainty in 2013. Just because evidence is made ‘better’ doesn’t mean that other pressing concerns on the policy agenda become less important, or disappear.

We must also tell good news stories more often. This shows policy-makers and the public that climate interventions actually work, building confidence to take potentially costly decisions. Yet we don’t hear success stories about climate change very often - whereas we are often very good at highlighting the ‘gloom and doom’. And yet there are many such stories out there – as a quick read of Andrew Balmford’s “Wild Hope” (2012) shows.

And the best thing about finding new ways to argue for the environment is that we can all do our bit. Work together to do something positive on the ground (don’t wait for policy guidance!), perhaps by making space for nature in your local community, and then show your local MP that your idea doesn’t just protect nature, but also helps you, the voter.

These ideas are taken out of an article in Nature Climate Change (paywalled) entitled ‘Five Ways to Enhance the Impact of Climate Science’.

Rose, D.C. (2014) 'Five ways to enhance the impact of climate science', Nature Climate Change, 4 (7) (25 June 2014): 522–524. http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n7/full/nclimate2270.html