environment

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News from Prosperity and Resilience: Dr Hilary Geoghegan

New initiative set to transform public’s engagement with environmental research

Dr Hilary Geoghegan was recently awarded £100,000, from the NERC Engaging Environments programme, to develop a national vision for public engagement with environmental research. The new initiative, called OPENER, will ask members of the public to help them in opening up research on the major environmental challenges facing the planet. OPENER will identify ways that researchers can involve people at all stages of the research process.

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Climate Justice: can fairness create a green future?

It isn’t just polar bears being affected by climate change – people all over the world are already being negatively affected by changes to the climate, from droughts, flooding, and ruined harvests. That’s not fair. Particularly as these communities had no role in making the problem in the first place. Fast forward a few years, and the environmental situation for our children’s children is not looking too peachy either… but could it look green?

If we changed the way we thought about climate change instead of it being ‘just a problem for science to solve’ to a problem about social justice, could we come up with a solution that addresses injustice that would help these communities and climate change at the same time? Can fairness create a green future?

As part of the ESRC Social Science Festival, the Climate Justice Scholars from the University of Reading will be hosting an afternoon exploring different climate justice topics through presentation-slams, interactive posters and challenges.

To top it all off, there will be a screening of the thought-provoking film ‘Greedy Lying Bastards’ – which exposes the deceit of the fossil fuel industries affecting vulnerable people – followed by an audience discussion chaired by university academics.

The event is free, and drinks & snacks will be provided to fuel the fun and debate!

DEGW FOUNDATION LECTURE

DEGW Archive Exhibition Open: 1700-1830,
Lecture Doors Open: 1800-1830, Lecture: 1830-2000

Lecture hosted by Despina Katsikakis.

Despina Katsikakis is a globally renowned expert on the impact of the built environment on business performance.

A former Chairman of international consultancy DEGW and recently with Barclays Corporate Real Estate, Despina has 30 years’ experience working with international organisations at board level, guiding them on how to use their workplace to affect behaviour and culture and how to align policies and processes to support innovation and organisational transformation.

With former clients including Accenture, BBC, Deutsche Bank, Microsoft, BP, GlaxoSmithKline and Google, among others, she has developed ground-breaking initiatives from global real estate strategies and policies, buildings and workplace transformation, through to processes and tools for real estate management.

Despina is passionate that the built environment should be developed with clear purpose and focus on both the end user experience and its impact on business, society and the environment. She has an outstanding track record advising developers, funds and their design teams on how to differentiate and future proof award winning schemes globally.

A regular conference presenter, facilitator and writer on innovation of the built environment, with a focus on future trends and their impact on organisations, buildings and the city.

More information to follow.

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To cut or not to cut – that is the question

By Dr Martin Lukac, School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading

Europe’s forests make a very important contribution to current efforts to decrease EU carbon emissions, as it seeks to satisfy its commitments to the Paris agreement.

Under a new proposal, all carbon lost from forests as a result of harvesting will count towards overall emissions. Some of the most forested EU countries argue that forest harvesting operations should not be included, because the total amount of carbon stored in forests will not change much.

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Academia/Industry Careers Event

Academia/industry Careers event

6th September 2017

Programme includes:

  • Research careers panel: find out what it’s really like from researchers in different roles in Industry, Academia and government research
  • Alternative careers panel: what else is out there? Hear about science communications, policy, clinical trials management and more
  • Becoming a group leader: what’s it like in different environments?
  • Keynote from Simon Lovestone: hear about his career journey, and how best to work with people from every sphere to push dementia research forward
  • Posters & Networking: Discover local research from academia and industry

Contact:

Francesca Nicholls
francesca.nicholls@psych.ox.ac.uk

Mark Dallas
M.Dallas@reading.ac.uk

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What can studying past climates tell us about climate changes happening today?

By Professor Sandy Harrison

I am delighted to be spearheading a forthcoming workshop to be held at Reading University in July that brings together observationalists and modellers working on palaeoclimates, model development and assessment of future climate changes to address this question.

Climate models are mathematical representations of the interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, ice – and the sun. The models used for future climate projections were developed and calibrated using climate observations from the past 40 years. They are also the only tools available to project the human impact on the environment changes over the 21st century. These models perform well in terms of global features (e.g. magnitude of global warming), but model performance at a regional scale is poor.

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The UoR science underpinning the Paris Agreement – as Trump announces US withdrawal

President Donald Trump has indicated an intention to withdraw the US from the Paris accord on climate change.

His announcement, made on Thursday 1 June, means the US will no longer recognise the collective aim of mitigating the impact of climate change.

The University of Reading is a world leader in climate science and research into the physical, economic and social impacts of climate change, helping to provide the strong scientific evidence upon which the Paris agreement was based.

Here, we look at some of this celebrated research, which remains central to the aims of the 194 countries that remain signed up to the Paris Agreement.

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India-UK Workshop on Thermoelectric Materials for Waste-Heat Harvesting

Bangalore, India, 8-10 January 2018

About the Workshop

The Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR, India) and the University of Reading (UK) are jointly organising an India – UK Workshop on Thermoelectric Materials for Waste-Heat Harvesting, to be held on 8-10 January 2018 in Bangalore. The workshop is part of the Newton Researcher Links Programme, jointly funded by the British Council and the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the event is also partially supported by the Sheikh Saqr Laboratory, ICMS, JNCASR.

The Workshop will bring together scientists from India and the UK to discuss the research and development of materials capable of converting waste heat into useful electricity. The topic is of global interest but it is particularly relevant for the development of India, where heat is abundant but electricity is still scarce: over 300 million people in rural India have no access to electricity, and those who do, often find the electricity supply to be intermittent and unreliable.

The main goal of the Workshop is to establish effective and durable collaboration links between researchers in UK and India working on thermoelectric materials. The workshop will also provide training to participating early career researchers, with sessions dedicated to experimental and theoretical techniques to investigate thermoelectric materials, as well as discussions of career opportunities in this field.

Call for Participants

Early Career Researchers (individuals holding a PhD and having up to 10 years of post-PhD research experience in a relevant field) from the UK and India are invited to submit their applications for participation in this Workshop. We will provide funding to selected applicants, including the cost of international or domestic travel, local travel (between airport and JNCASR), accommodation and meals.

Completed application forms should be sent via email to the Workshop coordinators (Dr Ricardo Grau-Crespo for applications from the UK, and Dr Kanishka Biswas for applications from India) whose contact details are given below.

In addition, there is a small number of slots available for self-funded participants at any career stage, who will need to pay a fee of £200 for covering the cost of registration, accommodation and meals. Self-funded applicants should also submit the application form for participation.

The deadline for applications is Friday 1st September 2017.

The Workshop Venue

The workshop will be held at the beautiful campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR). The institute is located near Bangalore’s International Airport, which serves direct flights from the UK, and it has first-class conference facilities including well-equipped conference rooms.

Keynote Speakers and Workshop Mentors

Prof. Umesh V. Waghmare (JNCASR, Bangalore, India)
Prof. Anthony V. Powell (University of Reading, UK)
Prof. Robert Freer (University of Manchester, UK)
Prof. D. K. Aswal (CSIR-National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi, India)

Workshop Coordinators

Dr Ricardo Grau-Crespo (University of Reading, UK)

Email: r.grau-crespo@reading.ac.uk
Dr Kanishka Biswas (JNCASR, Bangalore, India)

Email: kanishka@jncasr.ac.in

Chemistry Colloqium

“Development of Small Molecule Libraries vs. Novel Cancer Targets”

Professor John Spencer
University of Sussex

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Belmont Forum survey highlights importance of IEA role

By Sally Stevens, Institute for Environmental Analytics, University of Reading

An important new skills gap survey highlighting the urgent need for in-career training in state-of-the-art data analytics was presented at this week’s European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Austria on Thursday [April 27].

The key findings are:

  • 53% of respondents said the research habit that needed most improvement was reluctance to share data or models.
  • 52% identified the most vital skill for global change research as data processing and analysis.
  • 42% said the digital skills needing most improvement were computational and numerical analysis.
  • The biggest data challenge was data complexity and the lack of data standards and exchange standards.

The survey was commissioned by the Belmont Forum, a highly influential global group of science funders dedicated to speeding up high quality environmental research around the world.

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