Research areas

Leads

• Professor Anna Hansell
• Professor Mick Whelan

This challenge aims to develop a transdisciplinary understanding of how food, water, climate and energy systems correlate and interact in a rapidly changing and increasingly unstable world. Our research involves the study of multiple environmental hazards and the relationships between them. We also work with communities and stakeholders across the globe on prevention, mitigation and restoration options. Our modelling and monitoring work, for example our research into the importance of peatlands, contributes towards the net zero carbon target for land use and forestry.

Leads

• Professor Martin Phillips

Environmental relations and change pose major challenges in relation to justice, social inclusivity, and peoples’ sense of who they are and what they want to do and be. Environmental transformations, including climate change, are often driven by the activities of particular social groups and relations, whilst their impacts frequently fall disproportionally on other human and non-human populations and environments. Such inequalities in responsibility, agency and impact raise important issues of social, and indeed, multi-species justice. The voices, identities and understandings surrounding these changes and injustices are diverse, encompassing far more than is recognised in the dualisms of, say, climate change acceptance and denial. They are also often given unequal opportunities for expression and realisation within action. In relation for climate change, for example, technocratic, neoliberal, traditional-masculinist and neo-colonial discourses often dominate, whilst indigenous, radical and socially marginalised voices that can bring valuable perspectives are frequently disadvantaged within the public debate.

Against this background, we seek to undertake inter-/trans-disciplinary research that spans local and global issues and processes. Our research, for example, brings together arts, humanities and social science research with Earth Observation satellite data and biophysical measurements of past climates using stable isotopes and pollen records.

Through employing a diversity of approaches and methods we will:

1. learn from and about diverse and silent/silenced ways of living in past and present;
2. develop conceptual understandings of environmental (in)justice that encompass human and more-than-human diversity;
3. investigate injustices associated with environment transitions, including Net Zero, nature recovery and climate change adaptation, and how more just transitions may be established;
4. study climate sceptics and deniers, and how they have proliferated and boosted their advocacy in recent years;
5. examine how various actors and networks mobilise and communicate specific identities, practices and politics through constructions of nature and environment, and how these act to foster, obstruct or oppose environmental justices and injustices; and
6. inform environmental policies and practices by understanding their role in fostering, challenging and correcting human and more-than-human injustices.

Leads

• Dr Laura Basell
• Dr Moya Burns

Our research theme uses transdisciplinary explorations of relational ecologies of the past to inform current and future strategies for living with environmental change.

The impacts of environmental change, along with response and adjustment strategies, are transforming the biophysical environment, buildings, landscapes and communities we live in. Our research theme generates evidence on the impact of climate and environmental change and how communities and ecosystems can adapt and thrive as conditions shift. Our researchers work across the arts, social sciences, humanities, and environmental and life sciences, often using community/citizen science approaches. We seek to empower people to understand and manage their relationships with the environment in partnership with local, national, and international organisations. By bringing together diverse disciplinary perspectives on past socio-ecological relationships with contemporary ecological, genetic, psychological, educational and creative approaches, we craft narratives to guide and inform how societies can live with environmental change. Our landscape foci are also varied, including woodlands, uplands, urban, suburban, farmed and protected areas.

Key words: Adaptation, Co-production, Partnership, Interdisciplinarity, Sustainability, Education, Wellbeing, Forests, Resilience

Lead

• Professor Nibedita S. Ray-Bennett

This research challenge addresses one of the most pressing issues of the 21st century: the impact of a changing climate in an increasingly complex world. More concretely, this multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary research challenge operates at the intersection of climate action, disaster risk reduction, sustainable development, neglected areas of public health, and social justice to understand the challenges and opportunities for reducing the impact of disaster-related loss and damage on socio-economically vulnerable populations and on disaster and health management systems in low-resource settings.

This research challenge works closely with the Avoidable Deaths Network (ADN), launched by Professor Nibedita Ray-Bennett from the University of Leicester in 2019. ADN is a global initiative dedicated to finding theoretical and practical solutions to reducing avoidable disaster deaths. Together, we advance novel theories on risk governance and avoidable disaster deaths, and deliver evidence-based lifesaving tools, kits, interventions, networking, training, advocacy, and public engagement. In collaboration with Kanai University, the City of Izumiotsu, and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), we launched the International Awareness Day for Avoidable Deaths (IAD4AD) on 12 March 2023 in Osaka, Japan. IAD4AD is marked annually on 12 March and throughout the month, with a bold ambition to reach 100 countries by 2033, uniting stakeholders under the campaign slogan: “Disaster Deaths are Avoidable.”

This research challenge and ADN prioritise the most vulnerable and high-risk populations in the Global South, who bear the greatest burden of climate-related disasters, through the innovative Case Station for Avoidable Deaths (CaSA) model.

We are proud members of UNOCHA’s Leading Edge Programme, UNDRR’s Sendai Voluntary Commitment, and the Santiago Network’s Loss and Damage Network, and we maintain strong operational connections with local and national governments in low- and middle-income countries.

Join us in our fight to save lives by sponsoring our CaSA activities.

Lead

• Professor Mark Williams

How can we quantify the rate and degree of geological change to the Earth’s systems, from biosphere to atmosphere, hydrosphere to geosphere?

How might we quantify the degree of human changes to the Earth System, the planetary interactions between atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and biosphere that sustain us? The Anthropocene – the proposed new epoch of geological time – suggests that the Earth System became human-dominated in the mid-20th century. Nevertheless, its different components are clearly evolving at different rates, making the predictability of future change highly complex. Whilst damaging climate change is locked in for centuries it has not yet transformed the Earth to a greenhouse state. The biosphere has lost vast regional biodiversity and eco-space, though is not yet in a low-diversity survival state that is evident from mass extinctions in the fossil record. But at what point might such irreversible transitions occur at the global scale, whilst at the local and regional scale has this already occurred? This challenge attempts to bridge from the deep time to the present, and near future, to integrate multiple datasets to determine how far the Anthropocene has taken us down the road to irreversible change, and how we can intervene in a meaningful way to mitigate that change.

Lead

• Professor Paul Baines

The global transition to an environmental future in which humans live in equilibrium with the planet requires fundamental changes to the way we live, the energy we use, how we move from one place to another, and what we consume. Net zero greenhouse gas emissions means that humans emit as many greenhouse gases as we remove from the atmosphere, leading to the only feasible solution to the climate crisis. This research challenge undertakes research and impact-oriented activities to work with a wide community of stakeholder organisations from policy, the private sector, non-governmental organisations, charities, farmers and the wider public, to co-develop interventions that accelerate the net zero transition. The faster we change, the lower the costs of catastrophic climate change impacts such as floods, heatwaves, droughts and fires will be. The interventions we are working on include economic, social, policy and technological actions. Our approach is to deliver the evidence needed to implement the interventions, recognising that a broad consensus of the main actors is needed to make them a reality.

The GreenerFuture Leicestershire project, led by Professor Paul Baines, is an example of this work.