The New York Times reported today that climate change is such a big threat that academics are being forced to collaborate across disciplines. The starting point of the article, that “rarely do researchers cross disciplinary lines” seems fundamentally inaccurate. From the vantage point of international legal academia, I see so many people involved in interdisciplinary efforts, the vast majority of whom do not work on the problem of climate change. And, of course, interdisciplinary centers are not a particularly new phenomenon. In the 1920s and 1930s, many leading U.S. universities developed interdisciplinary centers focused on the social sciences, many of which included law. The New York Times article even includes a quote comparing the current centers to those focused on “ethics, innovation, or globalization” fifteen years ago.
Moreover, interdisciplinary work on the issue of climate change (and other environmental issues for that matter) is not a recent development. The IPCC has for many years brought together interdisciplinary work on climate change in its series of reports, and few would question that this problem requires serious collaborative work. From the science to the policymaking, climate change involves multiple scales--from the individual to the global—and a vast array of vexing intellectual quandaries. As the just-concluded dialogue in Bali reflected, meaningful conversations about emissions and impacts require a fluency in science, social science, and law/politics that it’s difficult for people to individually attain.
And yet the article has a point that there’s clearly something unusual happening around the issue of climate change right now which is reinforcing interdisciplinarity. I often marvel at the sudden explosion of new public, private, and academic attention. Only two years ago, I had someone question the relevance of studying climate change litigation during a faculty workshop. It was hard to imagine Al Gore and the IPCC collaborators winning a Nobel Peace Prize, not to mention the Supreme Court's decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. As universities establish sustainability institutes and leading law schools expand their environmental faculties, my hope is that this energy translates into the innovative solutions and political will that climate change and many other challenging multiscalar environmental problems demand.
