Insight
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Publications in Climate Change by NOMIS researchers

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 20, 2025

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus across different geographical and cultural contexts, we undertook a cross-sectional population survey resulting in a dataset of 71,922 participants in 68 countries. The data were collected between November 2022 and August 2023 as part of the global Many Labs study “Trust in Science and Science-Related Populism” (TISP). The questionnaire contained comprehensive measures for individuals’ trust in scientists, science-related populist attitudes, perceptions of the role of science in society, science media use and communication behaviour, attitudes to climate change and support for environmental policies, personality traits, political and religious views and demographic characteristics. Here, we describe the dataset, survey materials and psychometric properties of key variables. We encourage researchers to use this unique dataset for global comparative analyses on public perceptions of science and its role in society and policy-making.

Research field(s)
Social Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology, Public Health

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 2, 2025

Glacier-fed streams (GFS) feature among Earth’s most extreme aquatic ecosystems marked by pronounced oligotrophy and environmental fluctuations. Microorganisms mainly organize in biofilms within them, but how they cope with such conditions is unknown. Here, leveraging 156 metagenomes from the Vanishing Glaciers project obtained from sediment samples in GFS from 9 mountains ranges, we report thousands of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) encompassing prokaryotes, algae, fungi and viruses, that shed light on biotic interactions within glacier-fed stream biofilms. A total of 2,855 bacterial MAGs were characterized by diverse strategies to exploit inorganic and organic energy sources, in part via functional redundancy and mixotrophy. We show that biofilms probably become more complex and switch from chemoautotrophy to heterotrophy as algal biomass increases in GFS owing to glacier shrinkage. Our MAG compendium sheds light on the success of microbial life in GFS and provides a resource for future research on a microbiome potentially impacted by climate change.

Research field(s)
Biology, Evolutionary Biology

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

February 7, 2024

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.

Research field(s)
Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Public Health

NOMIS Researcher(s)

March 1, 2021

Future global environmental change will have a significant impact on biodiversity through the intersecting forces of climate change, urbanization, human population growth, overexploitation, and pollution. This presents a fundamental challenge to conservation approaches, which seek to conserve past or current assemblages of species or ecosystems in situ. This review canvases diverse approaches to biodiversity futures, including social science scholarship on the Anthropocene and futures thinking alongside models and scenarios from the biophysical science community. It argues that charting biodiversity futures requires processes that must include broad sections of academia and the conservation community to ask what desirable futures look like, and for whom. These efforts confront political and philosophical questions about levels of acceptable loss, and how trade-offs can be made in ways that address the injustices in the distribution of costs and benefits across and within human and non-human life forms. As such, this review proposes that charting biodiversity futures is inherently normative and political. Drawing on diverse scholarship united under a banner of ‘futures thinking’ this review presents an array of methods, approaches and concepts that provide a foundation from which to consider research and decision-making that enables action in the context of contested and uncertain biodiversity futures.

Research field(s)
Natural Sciences, Biology, Ecology

NOMIS Researcher(s)

December 1, 2020

Narratives shape human understanding and underscore policy, practice and action. From individuals to multilateral institutions, humans act based on collective stories. As such, narratives have important implications for revisiting biodiversity. There have been growing calls for a ‘new narrative’ to underpin efforts to address biodiversity decline that, for example, foreground optimism, a more people-centred narrative or technological advances. This review presents some of the main contemporary narratives from within the biodiversity space to reflect on their underpinning categories, myths and causal assumptions. It begins by reviewing various interpretations of narrative, which range from critical views where narrative is a heuristic for understanding structures of domination, to advocacy approaches where it is a tool for reimagining ontologies and transitioning to sustainable futures. The work reveals how the conservation space is flush with narratives. As such, efforts to search for a ‘new narrative’ for conservation can be usefully informed by social science scholarship on narratives and related constructs and should reflect critically on the power of narrative to entrench old ways of thought and practice and, alternatively, make space for new ones. Importantly, the transformative potential of narrative may not lie in superficial changes in messaging, but in using narrative to bring multiple ways of knowing into productive dialogue to revisit biodiversity and foster critical reflection.

Research field(s)
Natural Sciences, Biology, Ecology