Iokiñe Rodriguez

Threats to and attacks on environmental scientists occur against a broad backdrop of declining academic and scientific freedoms and escalating geopolitical conflicts globally. They undermine the integrity and credibility of environmental science, hinder its capacity to inform policy-making and public discourse, hold back progress on solving urgent problems, and exacerbate environmental degradation, resource overexploitation, and social injustice. Ultimately, this suppression of knowledge and evidence reduces our ability to prevent and mitigate environmental disasters, contributes to resource-centric conflict, and risks major humanitarian crises.

By promoting international scientific collaboration and robust decision-making by governments, the global scientific community can counteract the nationalist or ideological agendas and biases that often underlie these attacks and help prevent them from occurring. But how can the global scientific community respond, at all levels, when these attacks do occur, and advocate effectively for the protection and support of affected scientists?

Organised by the International Science Council’s Committee for Freedom and Responsibility in Science, this session will bring together a group of experts in areas relating to socio-environmental sustainability and resilience. Together, they will: discuss why and how environmental scientists are targeted; place this phenomenon in the context of wider polycrises; highlight the relevance of the principle of freedom and responsibility in science; and discuss the roles of the global scientific community and science diplomacy in facing this threat to the peaceful and sustainable development of humankind. Following speaker presentations, the audience will be invited to a moderated discussion with the panelists.

Dr. Iokiñe Rodríguez is Senior Lecturer at the University of East Anglia. She is co-founder of Grupo Confluencias, a consortium of Latin American conflict transformation practitioners, researchers and institutions that work on platforms for deliberation, joint research and training in this area. As a researcher in the ACKnowl-EJ project (Activist-academic Co-production of Knowledge for Environmental Justice), her work focuses on issues of local knowledge, power, environmental justice, equity and intercultural dialogue.

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