the Breakthrough Institute

Steve Rayner

Director, Institute for Science, Innovation & Society, U. Oxford

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The Director of the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society at the University of Oxford, Rayner describes himself as "an 'undisciplined' scholar, committed to changing the world through social science."

Steve Rayner is a widely known interdisciplinary expert in the fields of science and climate change policy, and an early critic of the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations framework for climate change. Rayner argues that climate change is a "wicked" problem encompassing complex and open-ended information that cannot be solved by a simple top-down solution, such as the Kyoto Protocol. Rayner was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for six years and also served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the second, third, and fourth assessment reports. Following Barack Obama's election in 2008, Wired magazine featured Rayner on their Smart List of 15 people the president should listen to.

 

Watch Steve Rayner discuss "Why the Kyoto Protocol Failed and a New Way Forward"

 

 

 

Steve Rayner News & Publications

 

"Planning for Plan B" Nature Reports Climate Change (2009)

 

"Oblique Strategies" The Economist (2010)

 

"Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation" Nature (2007)