Building bridges: engaging the environmental social sciences and humanities

Social and environmental challenges are deeply interwoven. Responding to overlapping concerns about climate change, biodiversity loss and inequality is not merely a scientific or technical enterprise, but also a deeply political, economic, moral and social endeavour.

Generating fair and effective responses requires a bridging and blending of different academic disciplines. This booklet outlines some recent work aiming to enhance such interdisciplinary work and lay the foundations for more effective collaborative communities, particularly focussing on the contributions of Environmental Social Sciences and Humanities (ESSH). One of the central messages emerging from this work was that people are at the heart of collaborative communities and the building relationships is a fundamental component of interdisciplinary research.

There are already good examples of such work from across the university, but there is also considerable potential to expand the contributions of the social sciences and humanities. These are summarised and expanded on throughout this booklet, which you can download here: ESSH PDF