Using evidence in environmental and sustainability issues

Abstract

It could be argued that concerns about the environment have become increasingly widespread, even mainstream. The word ‘environmentalist’ was coined as far back as 1902, and Rachel Carson helped to ignite an environmental movement in 1962 with her book Silent Spring, which drew attention to the adverse environmental effects of pesticides. More recently, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 have further highlighted the challenges, and increasing global attention has been paid to climate change. When the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals were revised into a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals in 2016, the choice of the word ‘sustainable’ was telling. Several goals are explicitly environmental in orientation: climate action; life below water; and life on land. In addition, other goals are closely interwoven with environmental issues, such as clean water and sanitation; affordable and clean energy; good health and well-being; and sustainable cities and communities, among others. None of these is a simple challenge. As individual nations and the international community grapple with increasingly complex and interconnected environmental challenges in a globalised and rapidly changing world, calls for evidence-based policy have grown. However, environmental and sustainability issues present particular challenges for evidence-informed policy and practice (EIPP) for diverse reasons. These include: the political prominence and broad sectoral reach of policies in this area (which often interact with a wide range of other policy areas); tensions arising from policy making at different levels (local, national, international); the wide range of spatial and temporal scales over which environmental processes operate; and the complex, uncertain and often contested nature of the evidence base.