This paper considers aspects of environmental social science research in the UK and explores an obvious bias towards the development of instruments to manage demand as an adaptation to climate change, and consequently the predominance of interest in the customer from a demand-side perspective. In the case of water, this has resulted in an inappropriate mixing of individualist research methods designed to measure public perceptions of risk and water-based practices, with mass consumption data that cannot be specifically linked to the individual. This mixing has a tendency to reinforce a long-standing blame culture that drives interest in the development of behaviour change initiatives while the relatively unchallenged hydraulic mission to provide safe drinking water and sanitation progresses. With this in mind this paper reviews examples of water use research from California, Australia, and the UK and highlights the more effective routes to understanding water customers and developing behaviour change initiatives that utilise stages of change models and grounded techniques incorporating qualitative and quantitative data from individual sources. A secondary aim is to argue for re-framing the relations between various actors in a changing climate to allow the development of new policy approaches, learning, and openness, from industry, regulators, and customers, based on new theories from the field.
Digital badges have previously been shown to incentivise journal authors to share their data openly. In this paper we introduce an Open data badging project at the Springer Nature journal BMC Microbiology. The development of the Open data badge is described, as well as the challenges of developing standard badging criteria and ensuring authors’ awareness of the badges. Next steps for the badging project are outlined, which are based on the experiences of the team assessing the badges, the number of badges awarded at the journal to date, and the results of an author survey.
Abstract. The climate science community faces a major challenge for communicating the risks associated with climate change within a heavily politicised landscape, characterised by varying degrees of denial, scepticism, distrust in scientific enterprise and an increased prevalence of misinformation (“fake news”). This issue is particularly significant given the reliance on conventional ‘deficit’ communication approaches, which are based on the assumption that scientific information provision will necessarily lead to desired behavioural changes. Indeed, we argue that the constrained orthodoxy of scientific practices in seeking to maintain strict objectivity and political separation imposes very tangible limits on the potential effectiveness of climate scientists for communicating risk in many contemporary settings. To address these challenges, this paper uses insights from a collaboration between UK climate scientists and artist researchers to advocate for a more creative and emotionally attentive approach to climate science engagement and advocacy. In so doing, the paper highlights innovative ways in which climate change communication can be re-imagined through different art forms to enable complex concepts to become knowable, accessible and engaging to wider publics. We demonstrate that in learning to express their work through forms of art, including print-making, theatre and performance, song-writing and creative writing, researchers experienced not only a sense of liberation from the rigid communicative framework operating in their familiar scientific environment, but also a growing self-confidence in their ability and willingness to engage in new ways of expressing their work. As such, we argue that scientific institutions and funding bodies should recognise the potential value of climate scientists engaging in advocacy through art-science collaborations and that these personal investments and contributions to science engagement by individuals should be rewarded and valued alongside conventional scientific outputs.
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