Over the last three decades, an increasing interest in how climate change will affect life on earth has motivated many comparative physiologists to focus their research on the effects of Anthropogenic drivers (mainly represented by climate change and pollution) on the physiological performance of their study organisms in order to identify critical thresholds and tipping points for their sustainable existence or mere survival. Experimental work started with short term single driver experiments but soon developed to include multiple drivers and sometimes even successive generations in an attempt to address as much of climate change’s complexity as possible and include adaptive, trans-generational aspects to project physiological reaction norms into the future. Addressing those ‘big questions’ of high societal relevance have the merit of creating high visibility and also funding opportunities, however, classic comparative physiology and biochemistry is running the risk of becoming marginalized in this process, if the underlying physiological and biochemical processes cannot be visualized accordingly. In my talk, I will present recent examples of how integrative ecophysiology research can be used to inform society and policy, which potential pitfalls we, as a community of researchers in comparative physiology and biochemistry, should avoid and what challenges we are facing when trying to balance fundamental research with answering the ‘big questions’.