CU's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research and its founding director, Roger A. Pielke Jr., will be awarded a prestigious Eduard Br眉ckner Prize Oct. 9 at the German Climate Conference in Munich, Germany.
Pielke and his colleagues at the policy center -- and at collaborating institutions around the world -- have spent the last five years examining how to move beyond political gridlock, which many scientists say is slowing U.S. action on climate change.
"In the climate debate, science is used by all sides in an effort to compel people toward a preferred political position," said Pielke, an Environmental Studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Perhaps counter intuitively, the use of science to force political outcomes actually feeds much of the present-day gridlock in the U.S. climate debate and the pathological politicization of science."
The policy center, which communicates its research through lectures, publications and a popular science policy Web blog called Prometheus, is pushing the scientific community to clarify a wide range of viable policy options for politically hot topics like global warming.
"These days, most important societal decisions are made with the input of science," he said. "If our goal as a society is to depoliticize scientific input for policy decisions, then some in the scientific community need to act more like honest brokers of policy options and less like political advocates," said Pielke, who is publishing a book next year through Cambridge University Press titled "The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics."
The Center for Science and Technology Policy Research was established in 2001 as a response to a growing need by the public and decision-makers for more usable, less politicized science. The policy center focuses on research, education, and outreach.
The center is part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, which is a joint institute of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In addition to offering a graduate certificate program in science and technology policy research and various educational programs for the general public, the Policy Center produces a bi-monthly briefing on its research that has a circulation of about 2,300. Many readers of the briefings are decision-makers from Washington, D.C., and around the world. The briefings, as well as the policy center's diverse publications, are available on the center's Web site at sciencepolicy.colorado.edu.
The Eduard Br眉ckner Prize was created in 2000 to recognize the importance of a continuous dialogue between climate science research and social and cultural sciences. Roger A. Pielke Jr. is the third recipient of the Eduard Br眉ckner Prize, which is given every three years for outstanding interdisciplinary work in climate research. Past recipients are historian Christian Pfister (2000) and oceanographer Ernst Maier-Reimer (2003).