Kai M. A. Chan, republished from The Canadian Science Policy Magazine
The bar for science policy just got a whole lot higher—all across
the world. It’s not clear that Canadian policymaking is up to the
task.
The relevance of science for policy used to be quite contained.
Science helped set the limits for arsenic in drinking water, for
particulate matter of various sizes in indoor and outdoor air, and
for population sizes and trends in determining whether species
were vulnerable, threatened, or endangered.
Over the past few years—and particularly this year—the domain
of science policy has exploded to include systemic governance
issues that were previously the sole domain of economics
and politics. How should governments encourage industrial
production? How should we make management decisions about
resources (not just which decisions, but how precautionary,
adaptive, inclusive, and integrative across sectors and
jurisdictions)? Also, how should we regulate which chemicals can
be used in consumer goods, and even how we should limit the
material and energy we collectively consume?
How did this happen? It happened thanks to two major but
under-appreciated advances, in science-policy processes and in
science.
The science-policy landscape always included studies offering
implicit guidance on such topics, but until now that guidance was
never both explicit and officially sanctioned by 132 of the world’s
nations. The innovation here comes in the form of UN bodies
such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
and the newer Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
Whereas in the past, individual articles had implications for
large-scale systemic decisions, they never had force for several
reasons. Many were too limited in scope, in at least one
dimension. Either they were local scale or they were global but
without distinction between national contexts. Many addressed
just one challenge—e.g., climate change—without consideration
of side-effects of actions on others. Many were not explicit
enough about what might need to change, while others were
too explicit, reaching beyond the evidence. And for every study
with one conclusion, other studies—equally reputable for most
policymakers—seemed to contradict it.
No longer: now assessments of IPCC and IPBES cover a global scope with regional differentiation; they review all the relevant
evidence while distinguishing the robustness of different studies;
and they are explicit about policy options towards already accepted global and national goals. Most important, these
assessments are not merely science—their central findings are
thoroughly reviewed, edited and approved in several steps by
member nations. Thus, not only are the studies relevant, pointed,
and authoritative, they get officially endorsed by the nations
themselves.
The second key advance is in the integrative nature of some of
the science. A central reality of policymaking is tradeoffs, such that
a solution to one challenge is no solution at all if it exacerbates
another challenge. Not only have individual studies become more
integrative across multiple considerations—e.g., climate, energy,
and land-based food production—but assessment processes have
become more integrative yet.
As one example that I know well, thanks to the pleasure of
leading this effort with more than thirty world-leading scientists, is
Chapter 5 of the IPBES Global Assessment, “Pathways towards a
Sustainable Future” (Chan et al. 2019). This integration included
a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of future scenarios
and pathway analyses that addressed the challenge of mitigating
climate change while providing sufficient energy for humanity
and maintaining space for agriculture and life on land. Beyond
that, it meant the same assessments of scenarios and pathways
for five other foci of difficult tradeoffs: feeding humanity without
undermining biodiversity; protecting and restoring nature in an
inclusive way that respects human rights and contributes to
human well-being; securing seafood for the future while protecting
nature in oceans and coasts; maintaining freshwater for human
uses and aquatic biodiversity; and resourcing our growing cities
while maintaining the nature that underpins them. These six focal
points correspond to several UN Sustainable Development Goals
and Aichi Targets for Biodiversity, which nations have agreed and
committed to through the General Assembly and the Convention
on Biological Diversity.
The biggest challenge is that tradeoffs also reach across these
six foci, just as intensive agriculture might produce masses
of food and leave space for forests and wetlands, but it risks
unacceptably tainting freshwater supplies for both people and
aquatic life. Accordingly, our international team had to evaluate
whether solutions exist to simultaneously achieve global goals
across all six foci, and what the broader literature has to say about
those solutions. Never before has a single analysis straddled
such an expansive problem at the scales relevant to national
commitments.
The answers pinpointed changes that were more systemic than
ever, getting to the heart of what it means to govern a nation,
state, or municipality. Solutions that addressed all six foci tended
to employ five different ‘levers’ of governance interventions,
and they tended to do so at eight different ‘leverage points’ in
social systems. For instance, virtually all pathways involved a
substantial reform of subsidies and incentives away from boosting
production at the expense of the environment, toward improving
environmental stewardship (a lever). And they applied these
levers at ‘leverage points’ like prevailing notions and narratives
of a good life, recognizing that the inadvertent adoption and
promotion of largely western notions of success that entail high
levels of material consumption are neither conducive to human
well-being nor to achieving collective goals for nature.
Is Canadian science-policy up to the task of contributing to
sustainable pathways for the planet? It remains to be seen, but
what is becoming clear is that the science is there to assist in that
task—and to evaluate progress toward it.
