Jane Lubchenco: “Scientists have to move beyond the doom and gloom"

"It’s not enough to simply present policymakers with information that doesn’t tell them what to do. Science needs to be given to them in a way that they can actually use" says Jane Lubchenco, world-renowned environmental scientist and the White House Deputy Director for Climate and the Environment.

Stockholm Resilience Centre – as part of Stockholm Seminars were delighted to have Jane Lubchenco as a lecturer sharing her insights and experience of the science-policy interface and what is fundamentally needed for translating science into policies and actions.

She currently serves in the White House as Deputy Director for Climate and the Environment and is also a world-renowned environmental scientist with deep experience in science, academia, and government.

Solutions are needed

At her lecture, held at The Royal Swedish Academy, she stressed the urgent need to translate our scientific knowledge into policy and actions. But doing this, she argued, requires greater engagement of scientists in this process and her message to the science community was clear.

“Scientists have to move beyond the doom and gloom and scaring people. Because that is simply not enough, and sometimes it puts people off.”

What is needed, besides the understanding of earth systems and the awareness of the problems, is solutions.

“We need scientists to say: Here are some solutions that we know are working. Here are opportunities to have win-win solutions with co-benefits that both create jobs, address inequity, biodiversity loss and climate change.”

“So that integration is not only helpful from a social standpoint, but also in achieving the end goals.”

Holistic approaches

She also underlined the importance of tackling the three pressing challenges of today – climate change, biodiversity loss and inequity/inequality – as interconnected issues, rather than as separate problems.

“These are intimately interrelated and we won’t be able to solve any of these challenges unless we solve them together collectively with holistic approaches.”

At the lecture she shared the frameworks that the Obama- and Biden-Harris administration in the White House have used to address these challenges collectively.

“Creating and implementing this holistic strategy has been useful and important and is something that needs to be done much more broadly at different levels in the U.S. as well as in other countries all over the world.”

See the full lecture here »