Ivory towers are out of fashion. No longer can the eccentric academic work in glorious isolation on esoteric problems. Accountability is in: governments want to know that their investment in basic science is paying off. Of course, they continue to fund curiosity-driven research but increasingly there are conditions attached. For the first time, academic scientists are being forced to think about the wider implications of their work – how might it benefit the commercial sector? How might it be relevant to policy? What use is this research to 21st century nations?
Such questions have now been formalised in the UK under the concept of Knowledge Exchange (KE). For example, a major funder of environmental research, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), requires each application for research funding to be accompanied by a detailed KE plan. This ought to be good news: most environmental scientists are motivated at least in part by a desire to make the world a better place, and recognise that this means communicating the implications of our research to as wide an audience as possible. But it begs the question, how can we achieve effective KE? As a result, effective communication of complex science lies at the heart of what it means to be a 21st century environmental scientist.
The first step is to learn from previous successes. The IPCC, for instance, has been incredibly successful in ensuring that its science now finds a place high on every political agenda, and climate change has entered the public lexicon. Other ideas have also filtered through, including the widespread adoption of the term biodiversity – a term, incidentally, with no universally accepted definition – into discussions of the natural world and our place in it. Considering such examples provides some pointers to the effective communication of our science in all its glorious complexity. In particular, I suggest that we – and by "we" I mean professional scientists, in particular academics – need to consider very carefully these two central questions: "who wants to know?" and "what do they want to know?".
Finding an audience
A strange new vocabulary is increasingly heard in university science departments, phrases like: "A core aim of this project is to increase stakeholder engagement. Focusing on the needs of the end user will emphasise the policy relevance of my work." If we say these things with a real conviction and understanding of the terms, and follow through with appropriate action, then such an approach is extremely worthwhile, in particular for highly applied research focused on specific management problems. But too often this lazy language is indicative of lazy thought. Or perhaps that's unfair – more accurately, it's indicative of the busy academic forced to tick boxes.
What do we mean by "stakeholder engagement"? Generally we don't mean that we want all those with an interest in the system we research to have an equal say in the design of our study. Instead we want them all to agree to what we're going to do anyway. Stakeholder involvement box: ticked. Certainly we don't usually have a plan of action in case one of our treasured stakeholders disagrees fundamentally with what we want to do. As one researcher told us, "stakeholder involvement is useful, stakeholder control is not"(1); we need to be more specific about what kind of involvement it is that we want.
Matters of policy raise still more issues. Quite often, workshops will be arranged with "policy representation"; and frequently this means that some government scientist or junior civil servant will have been invited. Exactly how they are expected to influence government policy is seldom explored. Even if we can connect with the real centres of influence, the interface between science and policy remains poorly understood by most natural scientists. John Lawton(2) contrasts the "deficit model" of turning science into policy – the model implicitly held by most scientists: "if I can just get the Minister to understand my experiments, the 'correct' policy will surely follow" – with the more complex and iterative interactions that really occur. So yes, it is incumbent upon us as responsible, ecologically literate citizens to try to feed the relevant results of our research into policy discussions. But let's be realistic, and not just believe that our job is done when our paper is published and our workshop complete(3).
Cutting the complexity
Having identified your audience, the key is to tailor your message to them. Busy people are looking for any excuse to ignore you: make this as hard as possible. For instance, when a colleague says they want to translate their research into policy, often I'm left thinking, "which policy"? How exactly does your recommendation fit into existing policy, government departmental structures, fiscal rules, and so on? Spell out exactly how it is that your prized results are relevant to the brief of the Minister whose interest you have finally piqued. If you can't be bothered to see policy as anything more than a homogeneous black box, it's a little unfair to expect politicians to appreciate the subtleties of your science.
Getting the message across involves thinking carefully about what it is that you want to communicate. Basic media training, now available to most environmental researchers in the UK, will teach you not to go into a radio interview prepared to answer whatever questions the host might think up. Rather, you take in your three key messages and manipulate the interview around them. Before going anywhere near a general audience, think carefully about what these messages are. Here, we are handicapped by complexity.
Complexity is what makes science fun to those of us who practice it, and obscure to those who don't. In my experience, deciding what is essential detail in your science is like packing for a foreign holiday. Lay out the minimum you think you could possibly get away with, then get rid of half of what remains. Scientists hate doing this, partly because we think the complexity is so cool and partly because we think it is necessary to establish our credentials. My point is not that we should completely neglect the details – often they can add colour to a central narrative. And certainly we should not present a simplified version of what we do if we cannot, when challenged, fill in the complexity. But for certain audiences (I would argue all except those reading our actual scientific papers) we should be more ruthless in sacrificing unnecessary detail in the pursuit of clarity.
We also have to consider uncertainty. As scientists we are trained to talk the language of probability. Speculation is frowned upon. We actually think we're pretty good at communicating uncertainty, but the thing is, we mean "to other people who also understand uncertainty". When faced with an audience more used to absolutes, we need to be a bit more forthright in expressing what we do not know and especially what we do know. So if I'm asked whether climate change is real, I say "yes". Without qualification. Because the accumulation of scientific knowledge means that we actually know a very great deal; often the uncertainties that remain concern details.
Clear outlook
Our communication of environmental science ought to be improving. After all, we're certainly getting more practice, and the world seems more receptive than ever to our messages. But there remains little incentive to communicate our research. Initiatives like NERC's obligatory KE plan may help to address this, but the fact remains that public engagement counts for very little in terms of career progression. I would certainly be better off career-wise writing technical papers that will be read by a handful of specialists than talking to a journalist from a national newspaper.
There will always be individuals who enjoy communicating but there will not be a culture of communication within our research communities until efforts in this sphere are properly recognised. One promising development is a new social networking site, Connecting Science, designed to create just such a culture. Hopefully this can avoid the constant reinventing of wheels that occurs each time that one of us stumbles into the spotlight. I'm convinced of the worth of good basic scientific research, but the world needs to know what we've found out.
References
1. Holt, A. & Webb, T. (2007) Interdisciplinary research: leading ecologists down the route to sustainability? Bulletin of the British Ecological Society 38(3): 2-13.
2. Lawton, J.H. (2007) Ecology, politics and policy. Journal of Applied Ecology 44: 465-474.