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Following the launch of the World Social Science Report 2013 "Changing Global Environments" at the 37th session of UNESCO’s General Conference, it was presented, inter alia, at the United Nations (New York) and at the Research Council of Norway.

King’s College London (KCL), in cooperation with the International Social Science Council (ISSC) and UNESCO’s Social and Human Science Sector, will now organize the United Kingdom launch of the 2013 WSSR on 11 June 2014.

Global environmental change is about people. The World Social Science Report (WSSR) 2013, prepared by the ISSC and co-published with UNESCO and the OECD, argues that social science needs to be at the heart of understanding and responding to global challenges such as climate change, pollution, resource limits and planetary boundaries to economic growth.

Drawing on contributions from 150 scholars from around the world, the report issues an urgent call to the international social science community to collaborate more effectively with each other, with colleagues from other fields of science and with users of research to deliver solutions-oriented knowledge for today’s most pressing environmental problems.

It calls for a transformative social science that is:
- BOLDER in reframing and reinterpreting global environmental change as a social problem
- BETTER at infusing social science insights into real-world problem-solving
- BIGGER, in terms of having more social scientists to focus on global environmental change
- DIFFERENT, in the way it thinks about and does research.

The launch will gather together distinguished social science and climate change researchers to present and discuss the key messages of the report and possible policy implications.

Speakers:
Dr Heide Hackmann, Executive Director, ISSC
Dr Lee Davies, (UK) Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Professor John Urry, Lancaster University
Dr Thomas Tanner, Overseas Development Institute, London
Professor Bronwyn Parry, KCL
Dr John Crowley, Sector for Social and Human Sciences, UNESCO
Professor Denise Lievesley, Head of the School of Social Science and Public Policy, KCL (Chair)