Welcome to the new online home of Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), we’re in the same place, but everything else has changed to make us more accessible and easier to follow.  We hope you like it.  

We are a small organisation promoting responsible science and technology, but with a remarkable, expert membership of hundreds across the diverse fields of science and social science, engineering and technology. We’re based in the UK but with a global outlook and involved in several international research and advocacy networks. We were part of the campaign awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, SGR is bringing itself up-to-date in the middle of rising recognition of a global climate emergency, a resurgent nuclear weapons threat, and huge ethical issues surrounding new technologies that question our identity, rights and democracies. We hope it means we will better add our voices and expertise to these era-defining challenges. Our materials and resources should be far more accessible, and the organisation even easier to join.

Conference announcement: should scientists walk the talk on climate breakdown?

Unashamedly we work at the cutting edge of ethical science and technology. That’s why we’re announcing the focus of our responsible science conference this year as a clear and challenging example: 

Scientists behaving responsibly: should science walk the talk on climate breakdown?
16 November 2019; London.

Now that we live in an officially declared state of ‘climate emergency’, everyone, government included, is being invited to adjust how they live and work to best align ourselves with the agreed targets to prevent climate breakdown. That includes the science community itself. In fact it’s vital, trusted role in communicating the crisis, places even greater responsibility on science to walk the talk of rapid transition, shifting to low carbon and low ecological impact living and working. Our conference will explore the necessary but challenging changes involved in making the shift.  We are lucky to have some of the best minds in the field to describe the speed and scale of transition needed, and the opportunities created, depending on the direction of travel we choose. Our speakers include:

• Prof Lorraine Whitmarsh - professor of environmental psychology, based at Cardiff University, director of the new ESRC Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) and an IPCC lead author.
• Farhana Yamin - founder and CEO of Track O, and a visiting professor at University College London, teaching international environmental law and climate change policy, she negotiated on the Kyoto Protocol for the Alliance of Small Island States and was an adviser to the Marshall Islands at the Paris climate talks. 
• Prof Kevin Anderson - joint chair of Energy and Climate Change at the Universities of Manchester (UK) and Uppsala (Sweden),  and previously director and deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
• Rebecca Willis - member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Research Councils UK Energy Programme, and an independent researcher working with Lancaster University on the politics of climate change. 
• Prof Bill McGuire - professor Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL, and a co-director of the New Weather Institute. His current book is Waking the Giant: how a changing climate triggers earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes.
• Dr Jan Maskell - chartered psychologist, co-ordinator of SGR's school education programmes, and chair of the Going Green Working Group of the British Psychological Society.

                CLICK HERE TO BOOK FOR THE CONFERENCE

Like the acknowledged threats from nuclear arms which preceded it, climate breakdown is now accepted as endangering human civilisation. The recent special report of the IPCC on what it will take to stay below the 1.5 degree warming target concludes that, ‘rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes will be needed in all areas of society.’ As an organisation, and at our conference, we plan to help identify those unprecedented changes for the fields of science and technology, and advance what it will take to make them happen.

Please let us know what you think of our new home, and get in touch via the website, email or social media, if you would like to speak to us, book for our conference, or become a member. Because turning this ship around is going to take a lot of us working together.

Best wishes from,

Stuart, Andrew, Vanessa, Jan & Phil, the team at SGR