Author: katberry

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Research Profile: Dr Giuseppe Feola

Giuseppe-FEOLA_1594_wDr Giuseppe Feola engages  in interdisciplinary research with a focus on  understanding how and why social-ecological systems transform along particular pathways, and under what conditions societal change towards sustainability may occur. Giuseppe’s research has three main foci, namely sustainability, resilience and transformation of agriculture and rural systems, alternative economies and grassroots innovations for sustainability, social change theory and sustainability.

Recent publications

Giuseppe has recently published two papers in leading international journals. In “Societal transformation in response to global environmental change: A review of emerging concepts”, published in AMBIO, Giuseppe contributes to the emerging scientific debate on societal transformation by discussing the potential and limitations of different transformation concepts, and by critically reflecting on the challenges of social research to support transformative change. Giuseppe explains: “There is a growing interest in societal transformation both as an academic concept as a goal for  public policy-making. However, there is no agreement on what societal transformation means, , what it should entail, and how best it can achieved. With this paper I seek to provide structure to the scientific dialogue and to reflect on the challenges of social research on the subject of social transformation.”

In, “Researching farmer behaviour in climate change adaptation and sustainable agriculture: lessons learned from five case studies”, published in the Journal of Rural Studies, Giuseppe and his co-authors have  developed an analytic framework that other scholars can use when designing future interdisciplinary studies on farmer behaviour. The framework facilitates interdisciplinary research on farmer behaviour by opening up spaces of structured dialogue on assumptions, research questions and methods employed in empirical research.

Giuseppe’s publications are available at: www.giuseppefeola.net/publications

International visit

Between January and March 2015 Giuseppe was visiting scholar at the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS) at Michigan State University, a visit that was funded by a British Council Researcher Links grant. Through this visit, Giuseppe has strengthened his collaborations with leading researchers in the interdisciplinary research field of human-environment interactions. Giuseppe was also invited to give a research seminar at CSIS. In his talk, titled “Do informal institutions adapt to the influences of environmental and economic changes? Insights from a Colombian peasant community”, Giuseppe presented the findings of the recently concluded research project ‘Adaptation between resilience and transformation: a Colombian case study’ funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.

To find out more, visit Giuseppe’s staff profile.

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Students learn about private sector resilience

Private Sector Resilience

Photo Peter McMannersPeter Mcmanners, who is a member of the HERG Resilience Research Cluster, presented a seminar to geography students on private sector resilience. He outlined the significance of sustainability in the context of a business response. The underlying rationale for the private sector to engage with sustainability was explained. He also pointed out the limitations on business to apply their capabilities to fashion significant change to the way they operate. Business is constrained by investors with short time horizons and an overall expectation placed on business to focus on bottom-line performance. Many of the changes required in society and the economy, to deliver sustainability and resilience, have the characteristics of long-term systemic change. This is something we are not very good at. The culture of short-term results is not conducive to the long-term strategic planning required to deliver a resilient economy alongside a sustainable society.

Current research into sustainability in aviation was used to discuss private sector resilience within a particular case study. This exposed a policy stalemate where the aviation industry is held back and unable to advance towards a low emissions future. There is the potential for a bright future for aviation but it requires radical change. In a global highly regulated industry with substantial sunk costs there is little appetite for transformational change. Current research into a new model for aviation was outlined and discussed with different passenger segments based on the premise that flying slower could be the catalyst to develop a new generation of low-carbon air vehicle.

Finally, the seminar returned to the big picture of the global economy and an examination of the macroeconomic policy which sets the context within which business operates. Discussion was around whether economic globalisation will continue of whether the imperative of resilience will be the driver towards a more proximized economy. The seminar did not arrive at a definitive conclusion but raised the possibility of a transformation in macroeconomics to provide business with a different macroeconomic framework within which to operate.  As sustainability and resilience rise up the policy agenda, we are likely to see much more consideration of transformational change as policy makers accept that the current state of affairs cannot continue indefinitely. If the private sector is to play an active role in such a transformation, it will have to be part of a wider initiative orchestrated by politicians and policy makers.

The seminar was a thought provoking session which produced lively discussion and debate.

For further information: McManners, P. (2014) ‘Reframing economic policy towards sustainability’, Int. J. Green Economics, Vol. 8, Nos. 3/4, pp.288–305.

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HERG contributes to work on adaptation and urban resilience in the global South

The Human Environments Research Group is contributing to work on adaptation and urban resilience in the global South. Two items hot off the press include a paper based on CDKN funded work on climate compatible development in Mozambique by Castán Broto V, Macucule D A, Boyd E, Ensor J, Allen C, 2015, “Building collaborative partnerships for climate change action in Maputo, Mozambique” Environment and Planning A 47(3) 571 – 587. 

Emily Boyd with international collaborators Aditya Ghosh (Heidelberg) and Max T. Boykoff (Boulder Colorado) also contributed a chapter on Climate Change Adaptation in Mumbai, India in newly published book The Urban Climate Challenge: Rethinking the Role of Cities in the Global Climate Regime (Cities and Global Governance) by

Craig A. Johnson (Editor), Noah J. Toly (Editor), Heike Schroeder (Editor). Drawing upon a variety of empirical and theoretical perspectives, The Urban Climate Challenge provides a hands-on perspective about the political and technical challenges now facing cities and transnational urban networks in the global climate regime. You can purchase the book on Amazon here: http://amzn.to/1CpFrRC .

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Dr Nick Branch & Mike Simmonds attend 11th National Heathland Conference

Mike Simmonds (PhD candidate) and Dr Nick Branch attended a national conference organised by the Surrey Wildlife Trust – “11th National Heathland Conference”. The conference brings together practitioners engaged in heathland conservation and management at a national level including SWT, Natural England, National Trust, Forest Research, and Borough and County Councils.

photoNick chaired a workshop at the conference on “working with academia”, which included speakers from Imperial College (Silwood Park) and Mike. The aim was to share experiences about the working relationship between heathland managers and Universities (e.g. ecologists, geographers, environmental scientists, archaeologists), and to discuss how this relationship can be improved through co-production of research projects, and better communication of data.

 

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Students learn about conservation goals

This term, students taking the ‘Resilience for Sustainable Development’ Geography module participated in a stakeholder role play activity, to understand how multi-stakeholder decision-making processes are used to establish conservation goals. The purpose of the activity was to demonstrate the complexities and politics inherent in stakeholder deliberation processes.  The activity used the specific example of standard-setting in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) production certification standard.  The RSPO is a multi-stakeholder initiative in which business and civil society actors are integrated into the governance process to address the negative social, environmental and economic impacts of palm oil production on a transnational scale.

 

Students took on the roles of different stakeholders, including international environmental NGOs, large palm oil companies, smallholder producers, and retailers.  A hypothetical scenario was given, that these stakeholders were taking part in the revision of the RSPO standard.  This scenario was adapted to the lecture room using a “debating class” format.  A conservation requirement, which would need to be followed by plantation companies, was proposed by the convener (who represented the RSPO Secretariat).

 

Firstly, groups were required to construct key arguments to convey how they wanted to shape the standard.  They needed to consider the interests and strategic positions of the stakeholders they represented.  Speaking to the individual groups, the NGO group considered whether they represented NGOs who lobbied companies, or worked with companies in a more collaborative way.  They recognized the trade-off that exists between how stringent standards are, and implementation of the standards’ requirements by companies. The large companies were content with the vague standard as it allowed them to define their own version of what constitutes sustainability, and the retailers had varying views of how strict the standard should be.  These varying views demonstrate the heterogeneity of interests, values and within stakeholder groups.  The group representing smallholder farmers felt that their voices and power were weakest out of the stakeholder groups.

 

The second part of the task involved the groups debating their positions in the wider group setting.  The retailers wanted to demonstrate Corporate Social Responsibility commitments to their customers, so pushed for the standard to be tightened, to reduce reputational risk.  The smallholders called for financial support from plantation companies to support their conservation efforts.  They also called for more options, to allow them to diversify their income and limit the impacts of monoculture cropping. NGOs showed a willingness of compromise, they encouraged more detail in the standard but were cognizant of the potential barriers this would impose for companies to adopt or comply with the RSPO’s requirements.  The large companies were willing to absorb some of the costs, support the smallholders in some of their demands, but also make minimal changes to their operating procedures so not to stray too far from “business as usual.”

 

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Following the larger debate, the group went on to reflect on what they learnt from different actors’ perspectives, and whether they agreed or disagreed with other stakeholders’ perspectives.  They considered what can be learnt about stakeholder processes from undertaking this activity, and also raised questions about the challenges associated with such processes.  These included: (i) Multi-stakeholder processes are complex and political, they take time and effort; (ii) Can the term ‘stakeholder’ be used to categorize such heterogeneous groups? Is it representative?; (iii) The more powerful voices will be heard, and the perhaps the voices that “better fit” with the design of the multi-stakeholder process; (iv) Compromise and consensus are needed, but this is not necessarily the most appropriate option for sustainability; (v) Some important stakeholders are excluded from the processes (the group identified these as being governments, and consumers), and some stakeholder groups are under-represented e.g. NGOs from developing countries, (vi) Implementation of requirements is crucial, highlighting the need for effective enforcement mechanisms or sanctions for non-conformance.

 

When taking on the roles of various stakeholders involved in the RSPO’s standard-setting processes, students expressed divergent views and interests, demonstrating the intrinsic politics of deliberative multi-stakeholder processes.  Students conveyed the complexities of understanding the effectiveness of multi-stakeholder initiatives as an emerging governance mechanism.

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Dr Chuks Okereke recognised for research excellence

Dr Chuks Okereke has had a flurry of good news recently, with recognition for the excellence of his research and confirmation of his impressive international reputation.

The United Nations opens the UN Climate Summit 2014 September 23, 2014 at the United Nations in New York.

Chuks explains, “The focus of my research is to explore how societies can best respond to climate change, which is now generally accepted as arguably one of the greatest challenges facing humankind. While recognizing the importance of science and technology in combating climate change, my research emphasises the social, ethical and political dimensions of climate governance. I am interested in understanding the climate strategies of various stakeholders (such as governments, businesses, cities and civil society organizations) and how these either enhance or inhibit the prospects for societal transformation in the response to climate change.

Moreover, because of huge asymmetries in both contributions to and impact of climate change across countries, my research explores options for combining climate governance with the reduction of global poverty and inequality. I guess it is the topicality of my research and the chances for real life impact that make the work I do so very interesting to both academics and practitioners.”

Climate Strategies Membership 

UN Climate Summit 2014 Photo credit: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images

UN Climate Summit 2014
Photo credit: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images

Chuks has recently been invited to join “Climate Strategies”, the most prestigious research organisation and network on climate policy in Europe.  The main focus of the group is to set, in collaboration with EU Commission and UK Research Councils, the long term agenda for research on EU and global climate policy.

Award Nomination

Chuks’ co-authored book Carbon governance, climate change and business transformation (Oxford: Routledge, 2015) has been nominated for an award by the British Sociological Association (BSA) as one of the three works that have extended “The frontiers of sociological climate change research”.

Funding for new project

Chuks has recently won funding from CDKN (DFID) for the project “Interactions between Industrial Policy and Green Economy in Africa“. The project is led by Professor Yacob Mulugetta at UCL . Chuks is a central partner and leader of the work package on ‘governance and political economy’. Other partners include the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (Ethiopia) and Quantum Global Research Lab (Switzerland).

The research period began in February and is planned to continue through to November 2016, with the total funding of the project over £370k.

 

Congratulations to Chuks on the exciting recognition! You can read more about his current projects and teaching at his staff profile.

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A Geographer Reframing Economic Policy

Peter McManners low resDoctoral researcher Peter McManners has had his paper ‘Reframing Economic Policy Towards Sustainability’ published in the International Journal of Green Economics. This reports conceptual research at the interface between macroeconomic and environmental policy, applying the concepts of sustainability and resilience. A key observation is that the dialogue about sustainability over recent decades has failed to reduce the threat that human activities pose to the global ecosystem.

Peter proposes that the time has come to question deep-rooted assumptions, including the role of economics. In this paper, priorities are re-examined and principles developed to be able to build a sustainable economy. It is argued that sustainability economics is subservient to society’s higher objectives and is about control and balance, rather than laissez-faire free markets. A new definition and conceptual model for sustainability is proposed that is closer to reality than the traditional models having cornerstones of ‘culture’, ‘land’, ‘population’ and ‘energy’. Using this model allows economic policy to be repositioned in support of the needs of society and compliant with effective stewardship of the ecosystem to deliver a resilient economy operating within planetary limits.

Peter McManners is a doctoral researcher in his third year supervised by Emily Boyd and Steve Musson.

McManners, P.J. (2014) Reframing Economic Policy Towards Sustainability, International Journal of Green Economics, Vol. 8, Nos. 3/4, pp 288-305.

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Professor Hannah Cloke awarded Vice-Chancellor’s Public Communications Prize 2015

NERC H ClokeCongratulations to Hannah Cloke, who has won another prestigious award for her high impact research and media engagement.  Hannah has been awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Public Communications Prize, which she will receive at the meeting of the University Court next month.

The prize is in recognition of Hannah’s work during the flooding crisis, with high profile appearances in the national and international media which led to a secondment to Government to advise Downing Street on the ongoing crisis.

To find out more about Hannah’s work, check out her staff profile and follow her on Twitter.

 

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Spilling the beans on climate change

Geography students studying ‘Resilience for Sustainable Development’ had a change from their normal lecture format recently and instead played a game. This wasn’t just for fun though, as ‘serious gaming’ is becoming a popular way of sharing complex information with a range of potential users and giving them opportunity to discuss its use. The students played CAULDRON, a game developed by members of the ACE-Africa project (University of Reading (Parker, Cornforth and Boyd) and Oxford University) together with the Red Cross/ Red Crescent Climate Centre, who have lots of experience designing games to communicate climate information. This game was developed to present the science of extreme weather event attribution in an accessible way, and provide space for discussion about whether it could be used in climate policy.

CAULDRON stands for Climate Attribution Under Loss and Damage: Risking, Observing, Negotiating. This reflects the fact that loss and damage due to extreme weather events is occurring all over the world and people are taking an interest in whether this is due to climate change. Negotiations are also currently taking place to work out how to address this loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The game gives players the chance to experience having to make decisions under uncertain climate risk, something many people have to do in reality every day. They also have to analyse changes in risk with only limited data and deal with the difficulties of negotiating with other players with different interests.

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The game began with players given the role of farmers who had to plant crops each season. They were each given beans to symbolise their crops and a ‘rainmaker’, which was a small pot containing a dice, to shake to determine their rainfall each season. Players who had good rains gained more beans, while those with drought years lost beans. Some players ended up in crisis with too few beans to be able to plant, so had to try and strike up deals with fellow players to be lent beans so they could keep playing!

Climate change can affect the probabilities of extreme weather events occurring, so for the next part of the game players were given new rainmakers. Some of these contained dice with increased probability of drought which would ruin crops, but players didn’t know which! Suddenly, there seemed to be more droughts happening and more players getting into crisis.

Players try to figure out their best farming strategy

Players try to figure out their best farming strategy

For the next part of the game, players became scientists. Using new rainmakers as ‘climate models’, they produced more statistics to help them work out whether their risk of drought had been altered by climate change. How trustworthy were the results provided by their models though?

Players became negotiators at the UN climate negotiations for the final part of the game. They had to work out how they were going to deal with the fact that some players had collected more beans than others. Some players had been acting as developed countries and so, along with fewer losses, they had greater historical emissions. Were they to blame for losses in the developing countries? After much debate, each group managed to come up with an agreement that all players were happy to sign. However, some players did say they felt they had been bullied into making agreements and noted that the develop countries were denying that climate change had happened at all! Solutions presented to address the loss and damage at the end of the game included clearance of debts that had accumulated between players, rules on farming strategies that would be used in the future, and agreements on transfer of beans for when players got into crisis. With such a range of ideas diplomatically expressed, maybe we have uncovered some of the negotiators of the future!

A spokesperson reads out his region's signed agreement to address loss and damage

A spokesperson reads out his region’s signed agreement to address loss and damage

 

By the end of the game, all the players said their knowledge of extreme event attribution had been improved. One player said their understanding had been improved ‘by creating a situation where extreme events had ‘real’ consequences and a political ‘reality’’. This is the key feature of participatory gaming, that players can experience the emotions involved and have to act under uncertainty rather than just learning about it theoretically. Furthermore, it provides insights into the challenges of climate negotiations and the inequality between developing and developed countries, along with the difficulties in separating the impacts of climate change from other factors.

This has been just one of the many times the CAULDRON game has been played, which have included players from sectors ranging from climate science to civil society. Each time the game has prompted lively discussion about event attribution science and dealing with the impacts of climate change and demonstrated that ‘serious gaming’ can be an effective, but also fun, way of sharing climate research.

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Farm advice on benefits of organic matter for soil structure and crop yield from Tom Sizmur

On Tuesday 10th February Dr. Tom Sizmur met with growers in Essex and Hertfordshire at Manuden Village Community Centre to talk about how soil structure and crop yield can be improved by adding organic matter to soils and boosting earthworm populations.

Read the full story on the Soil Research Centre blog here.