Surviving the growing pains of the inter-to-disciplinary lifecycle

Abstract

In PNAS, Shaman et al. (1) introduces a collection of articles from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences “Fostering Advances in Interdisciplinary Climate Science.” The papers provided an informative account of progress in interdisciplinary climate science, examples of emerging research, and some of the challenges that can impede interdisciplinary research (e.g., planning, funding, execution, and dissemination). However, when one reviews the literature, a pattern emerges where these same challenges relating to attitudinal (planning), communication (planning, execution, and dissemination), and structural bias (funding) have persisted over the past three decades (see, for example, refs. 2, 3, 4, and 5). Are these obstacles too massive to overcome? Or are the “growing pains” of maturing from an adolescent (emerging interdisciplinary field) into an adult (an established discipline) part of the inter-to-disciplinary lifecycle?

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