Interdisciplinary Research on Climate Change: Past Trends and Challenges for the Future

Interdisciplinary research is crucial to understanding complex and urgent environmental problems, particularly climate change. Universities are increasingly hosting trans-, multi-, and inter-disciplinary workshops and conferences and developing innovative interdisciplinary training programs (e.g., NSF’s IGERT program) to foster such research. Yet, much doctoral training remains highly disciplinary with very little evidence of graduate training producing transformative research that bridges the natural/social-science divide. Indeed, strong cultural and institutional obstacles often deter or preclude doctoral students from conducting such research. Here we analyze the past three decades of climate-change related dissertation abstracts to assess the balance between disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship among young climate change scholars. We analyze trends in the number of dissertations in natural vs. social science disciplines and code the abstracts of over 500 recent dissertations to assess how many dissertations reference one or more disciplines beyond the PhD-granting one. This research is sponsored by the Dissertations Initiative for the Advancement of Climate Change Research (DISCCRS).