دانلود رایگان مقاله پیاده سازی تحقیقات تغییرات اقلیمی در دانشگاه

Abstract

Many universities around the world have been active centres of climate change research. However, there are a number of barriers to climate change research, stemming both from the nature of the research and the structure of institutions. This paper offers an overview of the barriers which hinder the handling of matters related to climate change at institutions of higher education (IHEs), and reports on an empirical study to investigate these barriers using a global survey of higher education institutions. It concludes by proposing some steps which could be followed with a view to making climate change more present and effective in university research and teaching. These include changing approaches to research, outreach and teaching to better support action on climate change.

5. Conclusions As centres of research and teaching, higher education institutions are often in a position to significantly contribute to current climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. As this paper has shown, there are a number of barriers of various natures, which prevent them from engaging in effective climate change research. In order to overcome these barriers, there is a need to better communicate the value of research efforts on climate change mitigation and adaptation. It is not sufficient for researchers to simply perform research: their outputs should be more widely communicated. Researchers at universities ought to move away from narrowly focusing on restricting access to research results to specialist journals, and more towards using research findings to influence public discussions about climate change e.g. through the media, policy networks and to interested communities. This will need researchers to develop new skills, which will need to be supported by universities. Finally, climate change communication needs to be placed in the context of wider aspects of climate change research. Future studies will need to further investigate the potential for institutional research on climate change adaptation, including greater focus on the integration of matters related to climate change in the curriculum, or the perceptions of students and staff on climate change mitigation and adaptation.