Informing strategic climate action: the Climate Social Science Network

Abstract

ABSTRACT Thirty years of well-meaning efforts by environmental scientists, NGOs and foundations have failed to result in effective policy and nongovernmental action; we believe this is because the extent and nature of obstruction efforts are barely understood, and therefore not effectively countered. We built the Climate Social Science Network (CSSN) to address this damaging lack of understanding of climate obstruction. In the few years since our launch in September 2020, CSSN has grown rapidly to nearly 500 scholars in 35 countries, and shown that this research agenda is of wide interest and use for some of the world’s most promising campaigns to address climate change. We wish CSSN to provide detailed, systematic and reliable information about the organizations obstructing climate action to civil society organizations, investigators, litigators, and policy-makers. However, we have learned that doing so only through scholarly outputs is not sufficient, and even with a focused effort on outreach and translation, that academic institutions are not by themselves adequate to match the complex organizational network assembled by conservative actors seeking to avoid regulation and roll back climate action.