“Established research infrastructures can respond to new societal questions by building on the data, expertise and relationships they already have.” This is how Prof Dr David Richter (SHARE-ERIC) sees the role of ERICs in addressing today’s challenges, such as climate change. This topic was explored by Work Package 8 of ERIC Forum 2 and later presented at the workshop “How ERICs and EIROforum are contributing to the green and digital transition”. SoGreen is a case in point: SHARE-ERIC and the European Social Survey ERIC are both contributing to this project, which aims to build a shared set of survey questions on public attitudes towards climate change, the relationship between climate change and the economy, public support for climate policies, and evaluations of climate-related action. Read the interview to find out more.
What is SHARE-ERIC and what is its mission?
SHARE – the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe – has spent years following people aged 50 and over, tracking their health, finances, family lives and social connections as they age. Our mission is to help researchers and policymakers understand what ageing really looks like across different countries and generations. Following people over time allows us to examine how changes in one area of life relate to developments in another. SoGreen extends this perspective to environmental change: how do the places people live in, and the policies shaping those places, affect their ability to age well?
Together with the European Social Survey ERIC, the Generations and Gender Programme and GUIDE, Growing Up in Digital Europe, SHARE is working on the SoGreen project. What is the goal of the project?
SoGreen is a joint effort between, as you mention, four major European social science research infrastructures – each of which already surveys a different slice of the population: older people, adults, families, and young people. Together we were building a shared set of survey questions on the green transition, the SoGreen questionnaire module. It examines the social dimensions of the green transition through a set of thirty targeted questions. Its conceptual framework draws on key thematic areas identified in the literature on public attitudes towards climate change, including access to information and knowledge, engagement, beliefs, levels of concern and perceived threat, responsibility and action, the relationship between climate change and the economy, public support for climate policies, and evaluations of climate-related action. A central strength of the collaboration is the life-course perspective. The transition looks different to a young person, a parent balancing work and care, or an older person living on a limited pension. We want to make those differences visible and help policymakers respond to them.
Why is the green transition also a social question, and who risks being left behind?
Because people have different resources and different opportunities to adapt. Think of a tenant who cannot decide to insulate their home, a rural household without a practical alternative to driving, or an older person whose limited mobility makes it difficult to reach a cool public space during a heatwave. These examples illustrate why we need to consider environmental exposure, financial resources, health, housing and local infrastructure together. People may support climate action while facing real barriers to changing their own circumstances. The question is therefore how to make participation possible and share the benefits and costs fairly. SoGreen is designed to investigate these differences systematically, rather than assume that everyone can respond to the same policy in the same way.
SoGreen links survey responses to environmental data such as air quality, green spaces and extreme weather. What does this make possible that wasn’t possible before?
The important advance is the combination of comparable survey questions, information on people’s lives and linked to environmental context. SoGreen covers 17 countries in total across all four surveys. This creates opportunities to examine, for example, whether people lacking access to green spaces also live in areas with limited provision, and how that relates to their well-being or financial circumstances. And do people living in similar environmental conditions experience them differently depending on their social circumstances? Individual studies have linked these kinds of data before. SoGreen’s contribution is to make this approach more coordinated and reusable across major European research infrastructures, so comparisons can be made across countries and generations rather than one study at a time.
You are planning dashboards to show the public who is most exposed to climate risks, and where. How do you make this kind of data accessible to policymakers and citizens?
We need to start with questions people actually ask: Which groups are under the greatest environmental pressure? Where is it hardest to get to a bus, a park, or somewhere cool? How does this differ across countries and population groups? The dashboards and visualisations we are planning should help users explore these questions without needing statistics training or software, backed up by plain language. My priority is that visuals are clear, at the same time as being honest about their limits – showing uncertainty, avoiding suggesting more geographical precision than the surveys allow, and protecting participants’ confidentiality at every step. None of this happens in a vacuum. SoGreen’s Knowledge Mobilisation Lab brings researchers, policymakers and civil society together early on to help shape relevant questions and make findings useful beyond the research community.
What can other research infrastructures learn from your experience, and what comes next?
One lesson is that established research infrastructures can respond to new societal questions by building on the data, expertise and relationships they already have. Cooperation makes it possible to connect perspectives that no single infrastructure covers on its own. This requires investment in shared questions, compatible methods and clear arrangements for using the data. It also requires involving potential users early: producing good data and helping people use them are both part of creating impact. We already have a tangible output: the first SoGreen data from the ESS CRONOS-3 panel have been released. The next steps are to advance data collection across the participating infrastructures, develop the environmental linkages and translate the data into useful services. My longer-term ambition is for this cooperation to become a lasting capacity for studying social and environmental change.
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