Interdisciplinary Science

Understanding global change and providing policy-relevant information requires expertise from many different disciplines. In broad terms, the scientific approach necessary to understand global change needs complementary, interrelated research, observation and assessment activities. On the other hand, interdisciplinarity requires a firm basis in some discipline. A focused, reductionist approach to some questions is a necessary component in understanding global change, but is insufficient to fully understand the Earth System. We need both integrative and disciplinary approaches to make real progress.

We can visualize the need for both approaches by thinking of a puzzle. The goal is to have an accurate view of the “big picture”. Focused, disciplinary research is necessary to bring out the detail in the individual puzzle pieces, since the picture will be incomplete if this detail (or even some of the pieces) are missing. On the other hand, even if we were able to achieve perfect detail in each of the pieces, we would not see the big picture unless we assembled the whole puzzle – that is, do integrative, systems-level analysis. We must also keep in mind that these complementary approaches need to be continual – the puzzle is changing all the time!