Aims and purpose

Moving beyond the North/South divides, we seek to generate evidence to inform local, national and global efforts to advance peace, prosperity and social justice in an environmentally sustainable manner within the context of a rapidly changing climate. Members of the group explore questions such as: How will environmental changes affect mortality rates in cities? How can we improve flood risk mapping in areas with limited data on exposure and vulnerability? How do communities living in areas prone to such socio-environmental challenges experience and respond to these processes? How do governance structures affect land use change and carbon emissions? How might science influence the advancement of the 2030 Global Development agenda?

Current Research

(Re)negotiating power to enhance resilience to climate change (Dr Atkins)

Funded by the World Universities Network, this project is a collaboration between researchers from across the globe to examine climate resilience as a complex process that requires negotiation between different people with diverse needs, interests, and aspirations. In particular, it explores how deliberative spaces can be anchored more effectively in the day-to-day lived and localised experiences of struggling groups. In doing so, we explore that ways that negotiating and renegotiating resilience in rural and urban settings can be rendered more inclusive and place- and context-specific.

The Congo River: user hydraulics and morphology (Prof. Bates & Dr Neal)

CRuHM is a consortium of researchers in Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, South Africa and the UK undertaking large scale hydraulic and geomorphological research on the Congo River. Data and knowledge from this research project are being made freely available to aid river management authorities, consultants developing models, infrastructure design, and boost economic development while allowing careful management of natural resources.

Combining satellite imagery and machine learning to target social protection in Pakistan (Dr. Fox & Dr Wolf)

Funded by the Centre for Effective Global Action at US Berkeley, this project is a collaborationbetween the Sindh Province Social Protection Strategy Unit and researchers at Bristol and Lahore University of Management Sciences. The goal is to use machine learning to create small area estimates of socioeconomic conditions across Sindh province. This will highlight the villages or ‘clusters’ of greatest (or least) need, allowing them to be targeted for aid from SPSU.

Half a degree Additional warming: Prognosis and Projected Impacts on Health (HAPPI-Health) (Dr Mitchell)

HAPPI aims to use a super-ensemble of climate model simulations to quantify the relative risks associated with 1.5 °C and 2 °C of warming, with a specific focus on climate extremes and hazards. Past research from, or in collaboration with, the HAPPI project has included analysis of changes in temperature and precipitation extremes, tropical cyclones and mid-latitude storms, atmospheric dynamics, water resources and food production, and heat-related mortality.

Emergence of Climate Hazards (Dr Mitchell)

This project aims to provide quantitative information on the emergence of climate hazards over the next 30 years in response to the accelerated adaptation agenda, brought about by the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement. EMERGENCE will produce a synthesis of results from new climate model simulations, performed as part of the international Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6), across experiments designed to understand past, present and future climate change. The hazards addressed are extreme heat stress events, tropical deluges and droughts, and storms with their associated extreme winds and rainfall.

Complex Hazard Systems & Hybrid Geographical Narratives (Thomas O’Shea)

This project is a long-standing collaborative effort between researchers based at Bristol, the Kyoto Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI) and VU Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). Undertaken with an aim of developing a civic-centric framework for sustainable future co-existence between humans, their urban habitat, and the flux of the natural environment. Under the auspices of the UN SDG’s, ongoing research has sought to implement ethnographic methodologies within broad-scale, multi-level, system models to forge a contemporaneous blueprint for reconciling consistent sustainability with the harum-scarum throes of the ever-changing, and increasingly erratic, global system.

Transboundary Environmental Commons in Southeast Asia (Prof. Rigg)

Funded by Singapore’s Social Science Research Council, this five-year inter-disciplinary project focuses on the commodification of common pool resources that cannot be neatly contained within administrative units or governed by individual countries. Three work packages guide and underpin the research: the development of theoretical and applied policy frameworks to generate more socially inclusive and equitable distributive outcomes in environmental governance regimes; the transboundary dimensions of peatland governance to understand the drivers, impacts and innovations in dealing with transboundary atmospheric pollution linked to biomass wildfires, or the “haze” in Southeast Asia; and the transboundary impacts of hydropower governance in Lower Mekong countries to better understand how large dams are transforming downstream livelihoods, ways of life, and social perceptions of risk and adaptation. See: https://www.tecsea.info/

Sajag-Nepal: Multi- Risks: Planning and preparedness for the mountain hazard and risk chain in Nepal (Prof. Rigg)

This GCRF-funded project uses local knowledge and new interdisciplinary science to inform better decision making and reduce the impacts of multi-hazards in mountain countries. The focus is on Nepal, which experiences a range of hazards resulting from earthquakes and monsoon rainfall and is undergoing complex social, political and economic changes. The project is grounded within long-term community-based work with rural residents in Nepal, and reflects their articulations of the need to make better decisions to reduce the risks that they face. It also builds on experience of assessing and planning for earthquake and landslide risk with the Government of Nepal, the United Nations, and householders themselves.

 

Events

2021 Summer term seminar series schedule to be announced soon