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The scientific community has a sustained history of issuing warnings to society's leaders and policy-makers. In such cases, scientists take on the task of alerting those in power to issues they may not notice or not wish to see. A distinctive thing about environmental warnings authored by leading scientists is that they are addressed to "humanity." This paper argues that attempts to "speak truth to humanity"—despite the undoubted quality of the data and analyses—face three sorts of problem. There is firstly the difficulty that humanity is not a unified entity in the way that is often assumed and that, in practice, citizens may not be in a position to act in the way that is presupposed by those who issues the warnings. Secondly, though the declaration of a climate emergency may appear to be a desirable corollary of speaking truth to humanity, there are good reasons from political science to think that such declarations will be made for messier and complex reasons. Finally, even the more technical aspects of the warning documents may contain normative or social scientific components; they are not exclusively technical. Together these points argue for the engagement of humanities and socials sciences scholars in future attempts to offer compressive, integrated warnings to humankind.

The scientific community has a sustained history of issuing warnings to society's leaders and policy-makers. In such cases, scientists take on the task of alerting those in power to issues they may not notice or not wish to see. A distinctive thing about environmental warnings authored by leading scientists is that they are addressed to "humanity." This paper argues that attempts to "speak truth to humanity"—despite the undoubted quality of the data and analyses—face three sorts of problem. There is firstly the difficulty that humanity is not a unified entity in the way that is often assumed and that, in practice, citizens may not be in a position to act in the way that is presupposed by those who issues the warnings. Secondly, though the declaration of a climate emergency may appear to be a desirable corollary of speaking truth to humanity, there are good reasons from political science to think that such declarations will be made for messier and complex reasons. Finally, even the more technical aspects of the warning documents may contain normative or social scientific components; they are not exclusively technical. Together these points argue for the engagement of humanities and socials sciences scholars in future attempts to offer compressive, integrated warnings to humankind.

The author identifies lessons about bridging the science – policy divide to be learned from two studies of attempts to encourage public participation in the process of local air-quality management in urban areas in England. These studies were concerned with exploring the potential for public engagement with technical environmental matters as a means of connecting scientific expertise with publicly accepted policymaking. The studies differed in that the first was primarily an attempt to use citizen forums as a form of extended peer review for official air-quality modelling and monitoring procedures; the second was an exploration of novel techniques for allowing local citizens to express their knowledge of local geographies of air pollution. The author compares the underlying conceptions of public consultation or participation and draws lessons about the most practicable and appropriate role for public participation in the business of bridging the science – policy divide.

This article aims to discuss the definition of environmental issues and the validity of differentiating between industrial pollution problems and the use of natural resources. A comparative case study including countries of different political systems and socio-economic conditions provided us with data to reflect on this question.