The Earth’s population passed the 7 billion mark in 2011 and, although global population growth is slowing, it is highly likely that by 2050 we will reach the 9 billion, with many demographers believing that the world’s population will stabilise at between 10 and 11 billion by the end of this century. Such global population growth underlies the key global challenges of food and energy security, biodiversity loss, global governance, migration, conflict, and climate change. These individual and collective challenges in turn reflect complex interacting systems, and solving them will require transdisciplinary and transgovernmental responses.
At the core of the global challenges is the fundamental question of how we manage the process of economic and social development and the use of resources in a balanced fashion. In September 2015, world leaders set out a new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, recognising that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies to tackle climate change and environmental protection. On 1 January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)1 officially came into force.
1. End poverty in all its forms everywhere.
2. End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture.
3. Ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages.
4. Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
5. Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.
6. Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
7. Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all.
9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation.
10. Reduce inequality within and among countries.
11. Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
12. Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.
13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (taking note of agreements made by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change forum).
14. Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.
15. Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss.
16. Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development.
Earlier this year, the UK Government announced an investment of £1.5 billion in the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) to support cutting-edge research that addresses the challenges faced by developing countries2. New technologies and medical breakthroughs will be important. However, alone they will not be enough. The engagement of social scientists in the research funded by the GCRF will be critical in informing the understanding of required behavioural change and of the role of economic, social and political systems - whether it is the in-depth understanding of culture, norms and values of societies obtained via detailed ethnographic studies, insights into the role of political institutions in shaping legislative behaviour, through to modelling of individual behaviours using agent-based modelling.
Social science will also be essential in informing us as to how well we are doing in tackling the challenges, as measured by our progress in meeting the new UN Sustainable Development Goals. Monitoring progress requires investment in reliable and sustainable sources of data on, for example, poverty, inequality, education, and health, and in the analytical techniques needed to understand both the causes and consequences of changes in these fundamental indicators of human well-being. New and emerging forms of data offer opportunities to gather information on marginalised and vulnerable populations such as nomadic tribes and slum dwellers, previously excluded from routine data gathering operations such as Censuses, while social media and mobile phone data can aid our understanding of the movement of people and of diseases. There has never been a more important and more exciting time to be studying social science and investing in innovative social science research methods.
The key challenge of the twenty-first century will be how to end extreme poverty, fight inequality and injustice and fix climate change. World class social science, underpinned by cutting edge qualitative, quantitative and computation methods, will be central to providing the answer.
References
1. http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/
2. http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/funding/gcrf/