UBC Science’s Post

Name: How to bridge the natural sciences research-to-action gap
Uploaded: 2024-11-15T17:51:13.389Z
Duration: 2 min 19 s
Channel: UBC Science

UBC Science

4,098 followers

"You can’t separate humans from nature — we are within the ecosystem," says Dr. Fiona Beaty, a marine biologist who earned her PhD at The University of British Columbia. She uses a social sciences method called participatory action research that enabled her to develop relationships with community members and First Nations, and led to a position with the Great Bear Sea MPA Network Initiative. Learn more: https://bit.ly/498FWnv

Transcript

My name is Fiona Beaty, and I conducted my PhD at UBC in the zoology department, and now I work as the science coordinator for the Great Bear Sea Marine Protected Area Initiative. Conservation science as a discipline has really focused in on just quantifying species decline and really on the ecosystem side of the conservation arena. And that's in large part because natural scientists are not trained to think about the people who are affected by the nature that they're studying. So if we continue to only focus on the natural system and exclude humans from that natural system, then we fail to actually create research that can inform and transform human behaviours to places. There is a lot of really valuable ethics and principles that guide how people do work in the social sciences with other people that I think are translatable to the natural sciences and could really elevate, the overall impact that natural scientists have on addressing the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis and reduce harm associated with natural science practices. So by building relationships with people, you can strengthen the trust in the scientific process and in the findings and enhance the ability for community members, policymakers, whoever your audience is, to understand, trust and then apply that knowledge. By working with people who have longstanding relationships to the place and who have so much knowledge about systems in those places and why they've changed and past behaviours, I think that we'll be able to generate more meaningful impact, meaningful findings, and also better understand the complex problems that we're trying to solve through science. So institutions need to understand how they can support individual students and researchers who have this more interdisciplinary skillset to connect with, maybe funding resources or to support them to do work that's outside of the box from traditional, research activities. There's the whole publish or perish mantra in academia and so long as that exists as the guiding framework for success, it's going to undermine the success of researchers who are trying to carve out these alternative pathways.

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UBC Science’s Post

How to bridge the natural sciences research-to-action gap

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