Month: October 2020

Toward an age of low tech for a more resilient and sustainable society

Posted on by janet.crompton

The various restrictions that have been imposed to tackle the COVID-19 crisis have led many of us to reflect on what might be our response to other pressing issues that we face, especially inequalities in our societies and the major ecological issues of climate change, biodiversity collapse and resource depletion. What has the crisis told us about the state of our planet and societies, and are there wider lessons that can be learned from our response?

Even before the pandemic, we had begun to talk in public debate in ways that would have been unimaginable ten years ago: about the climate crisis and resilience to ecological disruption, questioning the dogma of growth at all costs. The pandemic has reinforced concerns about globalisation and challenged beliefs about the role of the state and the possibility of printing money in a real emergency, while showing that we could do very well without certain things, such as shopping trips to Dubai or cruise ships. Many of us have learned to value nature more, to seek conviviality and escape from the incessant pressures of modern life, while seeking to build societies that are more resilient to disturbances.

The crisis has further also exposed our societal inequalities in the contrasts between those who were confined in pleasant conditions and others in less fortunate circumstances, between those who could work from home and those who had to stay in their workplaces in order to keep healthcare, food supplies and other essential services operating, and between those who kept getting paid no matter what and those whose earnings dried up.

It is also clear that in many ways the response to the pandemic was rather ‘low tech’, based largely on modifying behaviour rather than on technology. We were treated to a few articles on surveillance drones and robots disinfecting the streets in China, but in the end we addressed the crisis through regulation and behavioural changes: staying at home, wearing masks, washing our hands, keeping a distance. This low-tech remedy is one that could be applied to the environmental challenges that we face.

Using a detailed analysis of humankind’s relationship with resources through history, I suggest, in The Age of Low Tech: Towards a Technologically Sustainable Civilization, an alternative perspective on how we should be marshalling our resources to preserve the planet and secure our future. I believe ‘high’ technology will not solve global problems and propose a different ‘low tech’ approach to building a more resilient, equitable and sustainable society.

How might this be done? We must reinvent our modes of production. In questioning the race for productivity and economies of scale in mega-factories, we should review the place of people in our economies, the degree of mechanization and robotization, and our way of choosing between manpower and resources. It is not about returning to the spinning wheel and draught animals, but about relocating workshops and businesses on a human scale to manufacture durable goods. Equipping these with a few simple and robust machines, we should be able to maintain a good part of current productivity, while reducing energy demand. Such manufacturing units, less productive but more labour-intensive and closer to locations of consumption, would be coupled with arrangements for the recovery, repair, resale and sharing of everyday objects.

With a few priorities – to eat well, take care of ourselves, to find proper accommodation – our ambition should be to produce locally, to be able to manufacture and repair tools, clothes, shoes, everyday objects, to value meaningful work. We will achieve resilience through a variety of actions and behaviours at different scales by individuals through their lifestyle choices, by businesses and public authorities through their purchases at all levels, setting an example and supporting initiatives to develop and support local economies.

In many areas we can drastically reduce our resource and energy needs, for example, in transportation, smaller, lighter and slower cars would have significantly reduced impact, public transport and bicycles even more so. We could reduce the environmental impact of digital systems by over 90% by avoiding duplicated networks and redundant systems; by favouring wired access, which consumes much less energy; by properly designing data centre software and architecture; by giving up the race for speed, real time and immediacy, which consumes a lot of equipment and generates additional traffic; reducing unnecessary functionality and performance; by working on the service life of the equipment, through modularity, ‘repairability’, compatibility and interoperability.

I believe that an alternative exists to our society hell-bent on extraction, production and consumption. What might make people want to contribute to a general movement with conviviality as a priority, with DIY, zero waste, repair shops, local agriculture and regenerated nature? It will be necessary to give the population some immediate compensations, as well as meaning and hope, not just ’blood, sweat and tears‘ or ’belt tightening for future generations’. One avenue is to move towards a post-growth system (economic, industrial, commercial, etc.) of full employment, or full activity, which is perfectly achievable. Power will come from people with convictions that want to make the change, but we also need to convince the public authorities, and businesses at every level, of the urgency of the situation. But it will take a profound rethinking of existing practices, economic models, regulatory approaches, cultural patterns and educational methods to reflect on our real needs and successfully implement intelligent sobriety. We are very far from it.

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This blog is written by Philippe Bihouix, an independent author and engineer, and Cabot Institute member Professor Chris McMahon.

If you enjoyed this blog, you can also read the book The Age of Low Tech https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/the-age-of-low-tech

 

Arctic Ocean: why winter sea ice has stalled, and what it means for the rest of the world

Posted on by janet.crompton
Ice floes in the Laptev Sea, Russia.
Olenyok/Shutterstock

Arctic sea ice plays a crucial role in the Earth’s energy balance. It is covered for most of the year by snow, which is the brightest natural surface on the planet, reflecting about 80% of the solar radiation that hits it back out to space.

Meanwhile, the ocean it floats on is the darkest natural surface on the planet, absorbing 90% of incident solar radiation. For that reason, changes in sea ice cover have a big impact on how much sunlight the planet absorbs, and how fast it warms up.

Each year a thin layer of the Arctic Ocean freezes over, forming sea ice. In spring and summer this melts back again, but some of the sea ice survives through the summer and is known as multi-year ice. It’s thicker and more resilient than the sea ice that forms and melts each year, but as the Arctic climate warms – at a rate more than twice that of the rest of the world – this multi-year ice is under threat.

In the last 40 years, multi-year ice has shrunk by about half. At some time in the next few decades, scientists expect the world will see an ice-free Arctic Ocean throughout the summer, with worrying consequences for the rest of the climate system. That prospect got much closer in 2020, due in part to the exceptional summer heatwave that roiled the Russian Arctic.

Shutting down the sea ice factory

The oceans have a large thermal capacity, which means they can store huge amounts of heat. In fact, the top metre of the oceans has about the same thermal capacity as the whole of the atmosphere. Many of us have experienced a balmy afternoon in autumn by the coast even though the air temperature inland is only a few degrees above freezing. That’s because the oceans accumulate heat slowly over the summer, releasing it equally slowly during winter.

So it is with the Laptev Sea, lying north of the Siberian coast. This part of the Arctic Ocean is usually a factory for new sea ice in autumn and winter as air temperatures dip below zero and surface water starts to freeze. That new ice is carried westward by persistent offshore winds in a kind of conveyor belt.

A map of the Laptev Sea with an inset world map.
The Laptev Sea lies off the coast of northern Siberia.
NormanEinstein/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

This process is powered by the formation of polynyas: areas of open water surrounded by sea ice. Polynas act as engines of new sea ice production by exchanging heat with the colder atmosphere, causing the water to freeze. But if there is no sea ice to start with, the polynya cannot form and the whole process shuts down.

Sea ice in the Laptev Sea reached a record low in 2020, with no new ice through October, later than any previous year in the satellite record. The exceptional summer heatwave across Siberia will have resulted in heat accumulating in the adjacent ocean, which is now delaying the regrowth of sea ice.

In the 1980s, there was as much as 600,000 square kilometres of multi-year ice covering around two thirds of the Laptev Sea. In 2020, it has been ice-free for months with no multi-year ice left at all. The whole Arctic Ocean is heading for ice-free conditions in the future, defined as less than one million square kilometres of ice cover. That’s down from about 8 million square kilometres just 40 years ago. This year’s new record delay in ice formation in the Laptev Sea takes it a step closer.

A rapidly changing Arctic is a global cause for concern. Thawing permafrost releases methane, a greenhouse gas that is about 84 times more potent than CO₂ when measured over 20 years.

Meanwhile, the Greenland Ice Sheet, the largest ice mass in the northern hemisphere, is currently contributing more to sea levels rising than any other source, and has enough ice in it to raise global sea level by 7.4 metres. And if the machinations of a warming Arctic still seem remote, evidence suggests that even the weather across much of the northern hemisphere is heavily influenced by what happens in the rapidly changing roof of the world.The Conversation

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Jonathan Bamber, Professor of Physical Geography, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

Jonathan Bamber

 

A ‘fresh’ start: Exploring the social dimensions of the food systems that supply Bristol

Posted on by janet.crompton
A chard seedling attempting to grow on Lydia’s patio garden

For many years now, I have been researching work in food production ‘out there’: beyond the reach of a day trip and in languages that are not my own. I found the Moroccan tomato so interesting that I wrote a thesis on it. Now though, I want to know what’s occurring closer to home. What of the food produced in the UK? Who is working in the fields? Who is taking the risk that the supermarkets will buy their produce or not? Who is footing the bill, personally, socially, emotionally, for keeping the food coming into cities despite Covid 19, and despite Brexit? After farm work was recognised as ‘essential’ during the pandemic, have workers gained status, or simply more health and safety challenges?

It is to these questions that I am now turning. I want to know who is working to feed Bristol and how they are getting on. More specifically, I want to know about fruit and veg; that food group that we all eat. Vegan, vegetarian, meat eater or flexitarian; we all eat some fruit and veg. Even if it is highly processed into a form with higher ‘added value’: perhaps a smoothie or the filling in a pre-prepared lasagne. What’s more, the UK government want us to eat a specific quantity: five portions a day. Scientists also estimate that if everyone in the UK ate these recommended portions, then our average carbon emissions would go down because fruit and veg have, in many (but not all) ways, a lower impact on ecosystems than other food groups.

How workers and farmers are getting on isn’t just important in its own right, but it also affects food security overall. This is particularly so in regards to exactly those foods which we need more of in this stressful, challenging climate, when it is all too easy to reach for the beer, or the chocolate or the ice cream. Not that I want to get into the business of identifying good and bad foods, they all feed us. Nevertheless, dealing with the coronavirus epidemic and the news that obesity is a major risk factor in suffering badly from the virus, brings fruit and veg into the policy arena again. In the new plan to tackle growing rates of obesity, adverts for fast food will be curtailed before 9pm and there will be a ban on ‘buy one get one free’ offers on sugary and fatty foods, with new encouragement for shops to promote fruit and vegetables. Yet while the focus is on consumers and their needs, the availability of fresh ingredients for this pro-health recipe goes unquestioned. OK, apples do grow on trees, but they must still be picked.

Some people will have seen other news stories. Of crops rotting in the fields last autumn, of seasonal workers flown to the UK from Romania and Bulgaria in the middle of a pandemic, working when everyone else is asked to stay at home. Putting their own lives at risk when white collar workers are ushered inside. More stories, of a lack of seasonal workers and of British workers signing up when for a long time such work has fallen disproportionately to migrant and European workers [1]. These stories alter as we draw back from the pandemic and its outbreaks, through Brexit, and prior to Brexit. Yet the question of who feeds us and how, at what costs and taking on what risks, remains for many of us, out of sight and out of mind.

So this is my new project, and I start this week. In my kitchen, because we’re in a pandemic and that’s where I have a garden table standing in as a desk. I do want to reach out though. So, if you are, or know a farmer or worker in this sector, please get in touch, I would love to listen to your experiences and your challenges. Or even come and see them. I’ve taken flights and chased questions about food to places that look like they will produce answers, simply through their seductive difference to my own normality. Now I am interested in the everyday difficulties in the details faced by farmers and workers in the UK. I’m not looking for heroes and villains, but simply for people who work in the food system.

To be specific, my project focuses on the conventional (not organic) side of the sector. This is simply because it feeds the majority of our country and the city I live in. That could be those who produce vegetables that end up in packaging branded with union jacks, but which otherwise, are just normal. Just simple apples, or tomatoes, or cucumbers, with lots of plastic and stickers, or none at all. I want to consider conventional scale production as close to home as possible and marvel at its successes, struggles and contradictions. Considering ONS data and recent analysis we can observe that only 1-2% of workers in the UK works in agriculture, yet nearly 50% of food consumed in the UK is produced here [2]. How is this done? At what cost? Who is helping and making sacrifices so that the apples keep coming and the carrots arrive fresh and looking perfect.

1. See, Scott, S. (2013), Labour, Migration and the Spatial Fix: Evidence from the UK Food Industry. Antipode, 45: 1090-1109. doi:10.1111/anti.12023

2. The estimate depends on the interpretation of data and could be considered as much as 60%, see, Lang, T. (2020). Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and what to Do about Them. Pelican. p., 26

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute for the Environment member Dr Lydia Medland, it was originally published on her blog Eating Research and has been re-published here with her permission.  Lydia has a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the British Academy to research food systems in the UK. 

 

Dr Lydia Medland

 

Is Europe heading for a more drought prone future?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Parched landscape of Europe during the 2018 drought. Image credit: NASA, CC0

In 2018, Europe was hit with one of the worst droughts so far in the 21st century in terms of its extent, severity and duration. This had large-scale effects on the vegetation, both agricultural and natural. Harvest yields were substantially reduced, by up to 40% in some regions, and widescale browning of vegetation occurred.

A consortium of international researchers, including members of the Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group (ACRG) at the University of Bristol, asked the question: given the major impacts on vegetation, which plays an essential role in removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, was there an observable change in the amount of carbon uptake across Europe during this event?

There are at least two ways to quantify the impact that the drought had on the terrestrial carbon sink: a bottom-up or top-down approach. Our plans and timelines to mitigate climate change rely on using these methods to predict how much of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions can be taken up by the natural biosphere. Currently, the terrestrial carbon sink (i.e. vegetation and soils) takes up approximately a third of manmade emissions. The oceans take up about a similar amount. But this important carbon sink is subject to variation brought about by naturally occurring variation in the climate and manmade climate change.

To investigate the impact of the drought on the European terrestrial carbon sink, modellers can predict how individual processes that contribute to the terrestrial sink would respond to the climate during that period – a bottom-up approach. For example, a study by Bastos et al. (2019) compared the estimates of net ecosystem exchange during the drought period from 11 vegetation models. Net ecosystem exchange quantifies the amount of CO2 that is either taken up or released from the ecosystem and is usually quantified as a flux of CO2 to the atmosphere. This value is negative if the ecosystem is a sink and positive if it is a source of CO2 to the atmosphere. The consensus from previous studies was that an unusually sunny spring led to early vegetation growth, which depleted soil moisture, which intensified the drought during the summer period. Although more CO2 was taken up by the biosphere in spring, in some European regions, like Central Europe, the lack of rain during the summer months meant that the soils, already depleted in water, could not maintain the vegetation, and this led to CO2 losses from the ecosystem.

At the ACRG we use measurements of gases in the atmosphere, like CO2, to improve estimates of emissions and uptake of these gases using a top-down approach called inverse modelling. Measurements are obtained from carefully calibrated instruments that are part of global networks of measurement sites like AGAGE (Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment) and ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System). We also require initial estimates of the fluxes, which we obtain from several sources, including vegetation models and bottom-up inventories, and a model that describes atmospheric transport of the gas (a model that describes how a pocket of air will travel in the atmosphere). Using a statistical approach, we can then improve on those initial estimates to get better agreement between the modelled and observed concentrations at the measurement sites. With this method, we have to account for all sources of a gas, both anthropogenic and natural, as the concentration that is recorded at a measurement site is the sum of all contributions from all sources.

In a recent publication by Thompson et al. (2020), we compared the CO2 flux estimates for regions in Europe over the last ten years using the ACRG modelling method, along with four other approaches. The combined estimate from these five modelling systems indicated that the temperate region of Europe (i.e. Central Europe) was a small source of CO2 during 2018. This means that when carbon losses due to plant and soil respiration are compared with the carbon uptake by photosynthesis, then a small positive amount was emitted to the atmosphere on balance. This is described by a positive net flux of 0.09 ± 0.06 PgC y-1 (mean ± SD) to the atmosphere, compared with the mean of the last 10 years of -0.08 ± 0.17 PgC y-1, which is a net sink of carbon, meaning that over the last 10 years more carbon was taken up by photosynthesis than emitted through ecosystem respiration. Northern Europe was also found to be a small source in 2018. This publication was part of a special issue on the impacts of the 2018 drought on Europe.

So what does this tell us about how carbon uptake might change in the future? A 2018 study by Samaniego et al. considered future projections from climate models under different scenarios ranging from 1°C to 3°C global temperature rise. They concluded that soil moisture droughts were set to become 40% more likely by the end of the 21st century under the current 3°C future compared with 1.5°C set out in the Paris Climate Agreement. Droughts like the previous “Lucifer” event in 2003, where as many as 35,000 people lost their lives due to the effects of the drought, are expected to become twice as likely. Failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we mitigate the global temperature rise will impact on our ability to grow food and make killer drought events more likely. Our study shows that more frequent droughts will reduce the biosphere’s ability to take up our CO2 emissions due to the impact of a warmer climate on the soil and vegetation of key natural sinks, and lead to fundamental changes in the structure and species composition of these systems into the future. Unfortunately, this will further exacerbate the effects of climate change.

Bibliography

A. Bastos, P. Ciais, P. Friedlingstein, S. Sitch, J. Pongratz, L. Fan, J. P. Wigneron, U. Weber, M. Reichstein, Z. Fu, P. Anthoni, A. Arneth, V. Haverd, A. K. Jain, E. Joetzjer, J. Knauer, S. Lienert, T. Loughran, P. C. McGuire, H. Tian, N. Viovy, S. Zaehle. Direct and seasonal legacy effects of the 2018 heat wave and drought on European ecosystem productivity. Science Advances, 2020; 6 (24): eaba2724 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba2724

M. Reuter, M. Buchwitz, M. Hilker, J. Heymann, H. Bovensmann, J.P. Burrows, S. Houweling, Y.Y. Liu, R. Nassar, F. Chevallier, P. Ciais, J. Marshall, M. Reichstein. How much CO2 is taken up by the European Terrestrial Biosphere? Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2017; 98 (4): 665-671 DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00310.1

L. Samaniego, S. Thober, R. Kumar, N. Wanders, O. Rakovec, M. Pan, M. Zink, J. Sheffield, E.F. Wood, A. Marx. Anthropogenic warming exacerbates European soil moisture droughts. Nature Climate Change, 2018; 8, 421-426 DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0138-5

R.L. Thompson, G. Broquet, C. Gerbig, T. Kock, M. Lang, G. Monteil, S. Munassar, A. Nickless, M. Scholze, M. Ramonet, U. Karstens, E. van Schaik, Z. Wu, C. Rödenbeck. Changes in net ecosystem exchange over Europe during the 2018 drought based on atmospheric observations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2020; 375 (1810): 20190512 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0512

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Alecia Nickless, a research associate in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

How banks are trying to capture the green transition

Posted on by janet.crompton
philip openshaw / shutterstock

Private sector banks in the UK should have a central role in financing climate action and supporting a just transition to a low carbon economy. That’s according to a new report from the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.

Framed as a strategic opportunity that climate change represents for investors, the report identifies four specific reasons why banks should support the just transition. It would reinforce trust after the financial crisis; it would demonstrate leadership; it would reduce their exposure to material climate risks; and it would expand their customer base by creating demand for new services and products.

The report is not alone in its attempt to put banking and finance at the centre of a green and just transition. Similar arguments are presented by the World Bank, by the European Union, and by many national task forces on financing the transition, including the UK’s.

In all these cases, banks and financial markets are presented as essential allies in the green and just transition. At the same time, the climate emergency is described as a chance that finance cannot miss. Not because of the legal duties that arise from international conventions and the national framework, but because banking the green transition could help reestablish public legitimacy, innovate and guarantee future cashflow.

Twelve years after the financial crisis, we may be aware that banks and finance were responsible for the intensification of climate change and the exacerbation of inequality, but such reports say our future is still inexorably in their hands.

Is there no alternative to climate finance?

Four decades on from British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s infamous motto that There Is No Alternative to the rule of the market, the relationship between financial capital and the green and just transition is presented as universal and inevitable. However, a vision of the future is a political construction whose strength and content depend on who is shaping it, the depth of their networks and their capacity transform a vision into reality.

Nick Beer / shutterstock
UK banks haven’t recovered their reputation since the financial crisis.

In the case of climate finance, it seems that a very limited number of people and institutions have been strategically occupying key spaces in the public debate and contributed to the reproduction of this monotone vision. In our ongoing research we are mapping various groups involved in green financial policymaking: the EU’s High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance and its Technical Expert Group on Sustainable Finance, the UK Green Finance Task Force, the participants to the 2018 and 2019 Green Finance Summits in London and the authors behind publications like the LSE’s Banking on a Just Transition report.

Across these networks, key positions are occupied by current and former private industry leaders. Having done well out of the status quo, their trajectories and profiles denote a clear orientation in favour of deregulation and a strong private sector.

Often, the same people and organisations operate across networks and influence both regional and national conversations. Others are hubs that occupy a pivotal role in the construction of the network and in the predisposition of the spaces and guidelines for dialogue and policy making. This is the case, for example, of the Climate Bond Initiative (CBI), a relatively young international NGO headquartered in London whose sole mission is to “mobilise the largest capital market of all, the [US]$100 trillion bond market, for climate change solutions”. Characterised by a strong pro-private finance attitude, CBI proposes policy actions that are infused by the inevitability of aligning the interests of the finance industry with those of the planet.

Let’s unbank the green and just transition

COVID-19 has emphasised the socio-economic fragility of global financial capitalism and represents the shock that may lead to an acceleration of political processes. While corporate giants are declaring bankruptcy and millions are losing their jobs, governments in Europe and across the global north continue to pump trillions into rescuing and relaunching the economy in the name of the green recovery.

Political debate and positioning will decide whether these public funds will be spent on bailouts or public investments, on tax breaks for the 1% or provision of essential services, or whether the focus will be on green growth or climate justice. But private finance is already capturing this debate and may become a key beneficiary. Getting a green and just transition does not only depend on the voices that are heard, but also those that are silenced.

Intellectual and political elites on the side of the banks are making it harder to have a serious discussion about addressing climate change. NGOs and campaign groups are participating, but only if they share the premises and objectives of the financial sector.

This crowds out more transformative voices from civil society and the academy, and establishes a false public narrative of agreed actions despite the numerous voices outside of this club. And it also normalises the priority of financial market activities, putting profit before people and planet.

The current crisis is an opportunity to rethink what a green and just transition would entail. We must continue to question the role of finance rather than taking it for granted and ensure that the “green and just transition” becomes precisely that: green and just, rather than another source of profits for banks and the 1%.The Conversation

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute members Tomaso Ferrando, Research Professor, University of Antwerp and Dr Daniel Tischer, Lecturer in Management, University of Bristol. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Daniel Tischer
Tomaso Ferrando

 

 

 

Welcome to our 2020 MScR cohort in Global Environmental Challenges!

Posted on by janet.crompton

September 2020 saw the arrival of the latest cohort on the MScR in Global Environmental Challenges. This year, we have students representing four Faculties, and six Schools; each with a unique independent research project that focuses on some of the most pressing challenges faced today.

With projects ranging from using chemistry to create clean air to artistic expressions of activism in Chile, we are delighted to introduce to you some of our new students below.

Harry Forrester

Can glacial flour stimulate N cycling in croplands? – School of Geographical Sciences

This research involves an investigation of the effects of glacial flour as a stimulant of microbial nitrogen cycling in cropland. Through this study, I aim to establish myself as a well-rounded Biogeochemist and explore interdisciplinary collaborations throughout the academic community. I hope to gain insight into environmental policy making, preparing me to enact effective change.

Lauren Prouse

An analysis into the ability of CMIP6 models reproducing the Sahelian droughts and what impact this has on their future climate predictions – School of Geographical Sciences

After completing my undergraduate dissertation here in the Geography department, I wanted to continue working on something similar. My undergraduate dissertation investigated the climatic impacts of the Great Green Wall of Africa – a forestry initiative implemented following the droughts across the Sahel region. Working with my supervisor Paul Valdes, we devised an idea of examining the ability of CMIP6 models to represent the Sahelian droughts of the 1970s and 80s, and whether their ability to do so affects their future climate change predictions for the Sahel. This is particularly important because the IPCC has recognised this region as a hotspot for the impacts of climate change, so researching potential future impacts will be useful for mitigation planning.

Dora Young

What would a “just transition” in Bristol look like? – School of Geographical Sciences

I’m a geography graduate from the University of Manchester. My academic interest areas are critical cartography and public participatory GIS. My experience studying Indigenous research methodologies in Australia and environmental humanities at undergraduate level also inspired me to develop research techniques that demonstrate a multiplicity of situated, embodied knowledges for democratic land use planning.

I’m excited to join the City Futures theme and its inspiring cohort. I hope to build on my skills of research design to produce a useful map-based participatory planning tool for Bristol and, potentially, other urban areas. It’s my intention map and visualise qualitative and quantitative spatial data, gathered as a collaborative community project, in order to inform both academic institutions and political governing bodies as they embark on ecological transitions and actualise shared futures.

I’m also interested in the diverse ways that people ‘read’ the messages expressed by their landscapes – natural and built – and how we form ‘cognitive maps’ of our surroundings. This is particularly interesting to me as we navigate radically shifting environments. I have some (limited) experience working across disciplines; my sister – a neuroscientist at the Charité University, Berlin – and I hosted a virtual spatial navigation workshop earlier this year. We explored the impacts of lockdown and modern life more generally on our spatial navigation capacities, cultural histories of navigation and how they relate to neural development, and how navigating can help combat eco-anxiety. We are currently working on a collaborative book chapter exploring the latter theme with two German authors; one GIS specialist and spatial anthropologist from the Universitaet Goettingen and a futures studies master from FU Berlin.

Fanny Lehmann

How is the global water cycle responding to climate change? – School of Geographical Sciences

I am a graduate mathematics student from the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I come from Grenoble, a city in the French Alps surrounded by mountains. I am naturally passionate about mountains, a place where climate change is so undeniable that it impacts our sporty lives. I see mathematics as a tool to model the world and help to predict its evolution. My Master’s by Research project focuses on the impact of climate change on the water cycle as part of the Global Mass project. I am delighted to start this year in such a vibrant community and hope to make the most of it to determine the research area of my PhD.

Helen Sheehan

Machine learning for wind flow modelling – School of Civil, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2016 with an MEng in Aerospace Engineering, and since then I’ve worked for a consultancy in Bristol as an engineer within the energy sector, primarily in nuclear power and offshore wind. I’m back at university to undertake Cabot’s MScR programme, with a project on “Machine Learning for Wind Flow Modelling”, which combines my interests in low carbon energy and software development. Although it’ll probably be a very different university experience for the first few months at least, I’m excited to take on this new challenge, gain new skills at the cutting edge of energy technology, and meet researchers from across the Cabot Institute!

Lauryn Jones

Eco-innovations for sustainable consumption: Bringing refill stations into leading supermarkets to reduce household plastic consumption – School of Management

During my time at Cabot I hope to gain lots of new insight into environmental challenges around the world and meet new people with innovative ideas. My personal research will be focussing on bringing refill facilities into supermarkets in order to reduce single use plastics, as well as looking at possible impacts the coronavirus pandemic may have had on people’s perception of the use of plastics.

Adam Chmielowski

Change: environmental, cultural, technological change and the stories of sustainable futures – School of Management

I’m thrilled to be starting my MScR at Cabot.  My research topic is “Change: environmental, cultural, technological change and stories of sustainable futures” and I’ll be exploring different ways of thinking about change, asking what forms of change are conceptualised in environmental campaigns and how effective they are in helping people transition to a more sustainable society.  I’m fascinated by the role of culture in enabling or constraining human behaviour, storytelling and the role of future visions to inspire action, and how you create change at a systemic or cultural, not just individual, level.  My research will run parallel to my day job which is running a strategy and insight agency called Starling (I’m awe-struck by murmurations!) where we help brands innovate and communicate better by analysing culture.  In the spirit of cross-disciplinary collaboration, I believe there is much more that the business world and academia can learn from each other to help tackle environmental challenges, so I hope I can help advance that effort.

Over the next year, we look forward to sharing their work and providing opportunities to mingle with the wider Cabot Institute community. Our very first cohort will also be graduating soon, so stay tuned to hear more about them and share in their success! 

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This blog was written by Cabot Institute MScR Coordinator, Jo Norris. You can start the Cabot MScR at any time of year and there are plenty of incredible earth-saving projects to dive into. Find out more on our website at bristol.ac.uk/cabot/postgraduate-opportunities/cabot-masters/
Sign up to our weekly newsletter for all the latest news, events and opportunities at https://bristol.ac.uk/cabot/news/subscribe. Find out more about our unique Master's by Research in Global Environmental Challenges at https://bristol.ac.uk/cabot-masters.