Climate Change Research at SED
Enhancing understanding of the relationship between human societies and the natural world is one of the ‘grand challenges' that faces us in the 21st century.
A significant proportion of our research aims to understand the multiple facets of climate change, spanning both mitigation (the reduction of greenhouse gases) and adaptation (responding to the impacts associated with a changing climate).
Researching Climate Change in Urban Environments
A key area of expertise in SED is urban climate change adaptation.
Particularly emblematic in this respect is the School's EcoCities project, which seeks to provide Manchester with its first blueprint for an integrated climate change adaptation strategy, and by doing so also draws wider lessons about how best to address climate change in other urban environments.
Research in our Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology (CURE) similarly focuses on sustainable city-regions, with insights and expertise drawn from the disciplines of spatial planning, geography, environmental science, policy studies and systems studies.
SED is also a leading centre for research on socio-technical resilience, both locally and at international levels. The Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) is driving this agenda forward, with research projects looking beyond design as an aesthetic or technical object to the complex processes and practices that run through the development, adaptation and use of built environments.
Environmental Change as a Natural and Social Process
Research in SED focuses on both the natural and social aspects of environmental change.
Our Environmental Processes Research Group (EPRG) conducts pure and applied research on the dynamics of contemporary earth surface processes, and produces spatial geo-information for environmental management.
Our Quaternary Environments and Geoarchaeology (QEG) group focuses on the other hand on the impact of past global climate change, and the development of modelling strategies to predict the impact of global warming on the cryosphere.
This is complemented by the work of our Society and Environment Research Group (SERG), which focuses on the political and economic drivers of environmental change, its uneven socio-spatial consequences, and the way these consequences are negotiated by a variety of actors.
Researching Climate Change in the Global South
Our research also focuses on the impacts of climate change on the poor and marginalised, in particular in the global South.
The School's Global Urban Research Centre (GURC) undertakes research on the impact of climate change and ‘natural' disasters on poor households and communities in cities across the world, as well as their strategies to build up resilience.
Researchers in the school's Brooks World Poverty Institute (BWPI) and Manchester Architecture Research Centre (MARC) are similarly examining how the urban poor in Bangladesh are responding to the increasingly dire effects of climate change.
SED researchers are also currently participating in CLUVA, an EU-funded project aimed at understanding and addressing urban vulnerability to climate change in Africa.
The School's Centre for Development Informatics (CDI) complements this with research on the role of ICTs in mitigation, monitoring, adaptation and resilience strategies in respect of climate change in developing countries.
Climate Change Research Projects at SED
Assessing the Use of Living Labs in Urban Sustainability Research
Principal Investigator: James Evans
Funding Body: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Challenging Lock-in through Urban Energy Systems (CLUES)
Principal Investigator: Simon Guy
Funding Body: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Climate Change / Urban Change
Principal Investigator: Sebastian Carney
Funding Body: Ministry of Urban Development and Environment of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg
Climate Change and Urban Poverty in Bangladesh
Principal Investigators: Manoj Roy, Caroline Moser, Alfredo Stein
Funding Body: Sustainable Consumption Institute
Climate Change and Urban Vulnerability in Africa - CLUVA
Principal Investigator: Sarah Lindley
Funding Body: European Commission
Climate Science in Urban Design: A Historical and Comparative Study of Applied Urban Climatology
Principal Investigator: Michael Hebbert
Funding Body: Economic and Social Research Council
Climate Proof Cities
Principal Investigators: John Handley, Jeremy Carter
Funding Body: Knowledge for Climate (Consortium)
Community and Institutional Responses to the Challenges Facing Poor Urban People in an Era of Global Warming in Bangladesh
Principal Investigators: David Hulme, Manoj Roy, Simon Guy
Funding Body: Economic and Social Research Council and UK Department for International Development
Conditioning Demand - Older People, Diversity and Thermal Experience
Principal Investigators: Simon Guy, Ralf Brand, Andrew Karvonen
Funding Body: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and EDF Energy
EcoCities
Principal Investigator: Simon Guy
Funding Body: Bruntwood and the Oglesby Trust
Green & Blue Space Strategies for Climate Change in Adaption in Urban Areas (GRaBS)
Principal Investigator: Jeremy Carter
Funding Body: Interreg 4C
Justice, Vulnerability and Climate Change: An Integrated Framework
Principal Investigator: Sarah Lindley
Funding Body: Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Modeling Climate, Ecosystem Services and Livelihoods to Identify Resilient Governance Systems
Principal Investigators: Tony Bebbington and Phil Woodhouse
Funding Body: Natural Environment Research Council
Open Innovation for Future Internet-enabled Services in “Smart” Cities
Principal Investigator: Richard Kingston
Funding Body: European Union
Peri-Urban Land Use Relationships (PLUREL)
Principal Investigator: Joe Ravetz
Funding Body: European Commission
ICTs, Climate Change and Development
Principal Investigator: Richard Heeks
Funding Body: International Development Research Centre
Scaling up Asset Accumulation Strategies on Cutting Edge Development
Principal Investigator: Caroline Moser
Funding Body: Ford Foundation
SCI-Energy Consumption, Climate Change and Sustainable Development
Principal Investigators: Stephanie Barrientos, Sally Randles
Funding Body: Sustainable Consumption Institute and Tesco
Smart Resilience Technology, Systems and Tools (SMARTeST)
Principal Investigators: Iain White, Joanne Tippett, Adam Barker
Funding Body: European Commission
SURegen - Integrated Decision Support System for Sustainable Urban Regeneration
Principal Investigator: Joe Ravetz
Funding Body: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
UK Sustainable Hydrogen Energy Consortium (UK-SHEC) CORE Programme
Principal Investigator: Sebastian Carney
Funding Body: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Zero-Carbon Habitation: An International Comparison
Principal Investigator: Simon Guy
Funding Body: Economic and Social Research Council
and UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Climate Change Expertise at SED
Gavin Bridge’s research interests centre on a desire to understand the spatial and temporal dynamics of resource industries, and to explain the implications for ecologies and communities as components of the natural world become incorporated into industrial economies.
Sebastian Carney takes a whole energy systems perspective to low carbon transitions; his work is almost exclusively performed with policy makers and seeks to inform mitigation strategies.
Jeremy Carter’s research interests include climate change mitigation and adaptation, environmental planning and management, strategic appraisal procedures, stakeholder participation, and flood risk management. Jeremy is currently an EcoCities’ research fellow and working on the GRaBS project.
Gina Cavan’s research explores human-environment interactions, focusing in particular on climate change impacts and adaptation in the built and natural environments, and climate change and tourism.
James Evans’s research explores the politics of environmental governance in three specific but overlapping areas: ecological planning, urban sustainability, and interdisciplinarity. James is currently working on the Sustainable Urban Laboratory: The Oxford Road Corridor project to examine Manchester’s Oxford Road as a sustainable urban laboratory.
Simon Guy’s research explores pathways of environmental innovation; identifying both the ways in which heterogeneous logics of ecological design have their roots in competing interpretations of the environmental challenge, and by exploring the ways in which these shifting logics result in contested visions of environmental futures in architecture, networks and cities.
John Handley’s research interests are focused on landscape dynamics and the management of change, ecologically informed and participative approaches to resource management and the development of adaptation strategies for climate change impacts. This has involved major research projects in both the urban environment and the wider countryside.
Michael Hebbert’s research interests include climatic factors in urban design, railway station design, historic buildings, and town planning history. He is the Principle Investigator for the ESRC project Climate Science in Urban Design.
Chris Hewson’s work focuses on ‘lay understandings’ of sustainable architecture, and in particular on ecologically focused or ‘green’ technologies, the connection(s) between sustainable consumption and environmental awareness, and energy reduction through behavioural change.
Maria Kaika’s research focuses on the politics and culture of architectural technology and design and on urban political ecology. Collaborative projects include work on: urbanism and culture; urban environmental history; representations of nature and the city; governance and environmental policy; and theoretical approaches to sustainability.
Andrew Karvonen’s research interests include urban political ecology, infrastructure, sustainable development, technical expertise, and the politics of design. Andrew is currently working on the Sustainable Urban Laboratory: The Oxford Road Corridor project with James Evans to examine Manchester’s Oxford Road as a sustainable urban laboratory.
Alexandra Kazmierczak’s research focuses on the adaptation to climate change in urban environments, urban green spaces, spatial planning, social cohesion, environmental justice and urgan regeneration.
Richard Kingston’s research interests and area of expertise are in the development, designing and implementing of software systems for web-based public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS).
Sarah Lindley’s research interests are associated with human-environment interactions, researching the spatial dimensions of urban air pollution and climate adaptation, and decision support for sustainable urban and regional development through the application of GIS-based spatial analysis, modelling and risk analysis techniques.
Caroline Moser’s research interests focus on asset accumulation and poverty reduction in cities of the South, including household asset vulnerability, transnational migration, and asset adaptation to climate change. Her current projects include Pro-Poor Adaptation to Climate Change in Urban Centres: Kenya and Nicaragua Case Studies and Intergenerational Asset Accumulation and Poverty Reduction in Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Paul O’Hare’s research focuses on resilient design for flooding and water management, resilient design for crowded public places, and public and civil society engagement in governance and decision-making around planning and environmental issues.
Alison Parker’s research focuses on the perceptions of policy makers on the difficulties associated with meeting climate change mitigation targets, and perceptions of the future of renewable energy in Europe.
Graeme Sherriff investigates the relationship between sustainability and planning, with a particular focus on how environmental impacts and the policies that seek to mitigate them relate to social justice concerns.
Erik Swyngedouw’s research interests include geographical political economy and political ecology, with special attention to transformations in the capitalist space economy. The articulation between local/regional and national/transnational processes has in particular been of central importance in Erik’s work.
Joanne Tippett’s research interests includes systems based ecological planning, capacity building and adaptive learning and open source in knowledge propagation.
Joe Ravetz is a leading thinker on sustainable futures for urban and regional development, and the methods and tools which are needed to help make the transition. His research interests include environment-development studies, spatial development studies, futures and information systems, and evaluation and participation studies
Manoj Roy works on climate change and urban poverty in Bangladesh. His current research focuses on understanding how vulnerable urban communities in Bangladesh respond to climate change impacts and investigate how to enhance their resilience to such threats through design, planning and community organisation.
Iain White’s research interests lie in exploring the emerging interdisciplinary nature of environmental planning, adaptation to climate change and the effective management of water in society.