Reflecting on the role of science advice in theclimate crisis: The importance ofscience-society-policy interfaces

Anthropogenic climate change is to date one of the most pressing and challenging issues for our societies and their global interactions and dynamics. Although the material and societal causes and effects of climate change are well understood from different branches and fields of science such as natural and social sciences and the humanities, the implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures generally falls behind the self-set political goals. So why does the knowledge-action gap exist and how can it be addressed from the science community?

In Germany, the recently increasing political awareness among politicians and in the society as a whole, is generally followed by progressing climate legislation. However, some recent climate-related policy proposals on the German federal level were associated with a large amount of misinformation, public mistrust, and a largely uninformed public and political debate. On the local level we observe a similar increase in political dissent on climate policy in the city of Frankfurt (Main).

Aiming to inform societal processes and enable the necessary transformation to net carbon neutrality, scientists are more and more invested in both direct communication with a broader audience and direct interaction with politicians and policy-makers in science-society and science-policy interfaces, respectively. Based on our experience with both mentioned information pathways in the role of the honest broker, we argue that there is an additional need for integrated knowledge brokering in science-society-policy interactions including a larger number of stakeholders. Finally, we want to challenge the idea of science only brokering knowledge to individual stakeholders and put forward the aim of science not only informing but mediating the debate between the different agents. We are reshaping the role of scientists from being an informant to taking an active role in societal change and the debate about it.