Social and Earth System Sciences – A Not-So Unlikely Pair in the Quest of Tackling Human-Centred Challenges

The concept of co-design is often cited in connection with the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). Still, collaboration across disciplines is uncommon, despite the urgency to address fundamental questions about how society can cope with and adapt to climate and environmental changes.

Social sciences encompass the study of human society and social relationships, including fields like economics, law, psychology, and politics. Thus, integrating social scientists into the research design of human-centred environmental studies is a logical consideration.

With the increased digitisation of society and research, new opportunities have emerged for more engaging collaboration among disciplines through data sharing, reuse, blending, and enrichment. There is, however, a prerequisite: the data must be trustworthy, well-curated, and interoperable.

CESSDA ERIC (https://www.cessda.eu/), the umbrella organisation of European Data Archives in the Social Sciences, has accumulated expertise in FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) research data management, curation and long-term preservation over the past 50 years. CESSDA promotes the DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) standard (http://ddialliance.org/) and has recently adopted the DDI-CDI (Cross-Domain Integration), a standard for cross-disciplinarity work.

As a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), CESSDA, along with 27 other pan-European research infrastructures, has gained visibility among European decision-makers as a strategic asset for European research. This collective presence provides a framework for collaborative development and knowledge sharing in community practices, tools, policies, and standards.

Collaboration between social science research and other disciplines is facilitated through five Science Clusters. In particular, SSHOC (the Social Science and Humanities Open Cloud - https://sshopencloud.eu/) and ENVRI (Environmental Research Infrastructures- https://envri.eu/) approaches can serve as a template for a) researchers to establish national or local modes of cooperation to pool resources or exchange knowledge; b) advancing standard agreements among research domains and beyond; c) supporting cross-disciplinarity initiatives such as OSCARS (https://oscars-project.eu/) or the WorldFAIR project (https://worldfair-project.eu/); and d) engaging with existing national or new data research infrastructures.