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I argue that our discipline is caught in a rut of irrelevancy on the grander scale. Much of our research is focussed on refining the basics of what we essentially already know well. While there will always be processes to understand, species to describe, and relationships to measure, our discipline can no longer afford to avoid the biggest sustainability issues, including inter alia increasing agricultural production without further destruction of ecosystem integrity, low-impact energy provision for electricity and fuels, human overpopulation and how to reduce it ethically and fairly, and massive ecosystem restoration at meaningful scales. While we argue about the best ways to conserve species, we are still losing our forests, coral reefs, climate regulation, and food-production efficiency with increasing speed. Most of us become comfortable with what we know, and therefore spend most of our time refining our area of expertise. Instead, more of us should jump out of our comfort zones and learn some physics, engineering, climatology, economics, and political science to expand our limited world view. This means that we must do more than just 'engage with stakeholders' post-publication; instead, we need to generate and test hypotheses that explicitly attempt to solve complex problems that transcend mere biological processes. Multidisciplinary teams can assist, but more relevant progress will require biologists themselves to adopt data, approaches, and communication strategies from other fields (many of them not residing within the sciences). Including policy implementers from the outset will potentially increase the probability of uptake in government and industry provided we examine the questions they deem most pertinent. This approach will probably require compromises, but tangible changes in policy arising from dedicated research will be more easily measured and demonstrated following this approach. With a little more effort, I think conservation biologists would be far more relevant and successful in turning some of the threatening unsustainability tide back towards more acceptable outcomes. ; peerReviewed

Peace studies seeks to understand the negation of violence through conflict transformation, cooperation and harmony by drawing from many disciplines, including psychology, sociology and anthropology, political science, economics, international relations, international law and history. This raises the problem of the complementarity, coexistence and integration of different systems of knowledge. In fact, all of the human and social sciences are products of the post-Westphalian state system and so reify the state and its internal and international system and focus on this as the main source of political conflict. Conflicts, however, can arise from other distinctions involving gender, generation, race, class and so on. To contribute to peace building and conflict resolution, the social sciences must be globalized, developing theories that address conflicts at the levels of interpersonal interaction ( micro), within countries ( meso), between nations ( macro ), and between whole regions or civilizations ( mega). Psychiatry and the "psy" disciplines can contribute to peace building and conflict resolution through understanding the interactions between processes at each of these levels and the mental health or illness of individuals.

This article provides an appraisal of collaborative conceptual modelling (CCM) as a tool for research translation. First developed by Newell and Proust (2012), CCM draws on the tools and frameworks of systems thinking as a way of addressing transdisciplinary problems. We applied CCM in two separate workshops – one discussing 'Digital Cities', and the other on 'Energy Futures'. The aim was to assess the value and limitations of CCM in an applied setting, as well as its value in producing transdisciplinary research outcomes. We found that CCM is a valuable tool for researchers interested in addressing complex or 'wicked' problems. At the same time, it has its own challenges. These barriers include recruiting workshop participants who are not researchers; assisting workshop participants in developing a truly collaborative approach; and training participants in how to draw some of the main CCM tools (particularly causal loop diagrams). Future research will explore how to address these challenges, and apply CCM in a contested space.