Implementing change
Technology is important, but it become meaningless unless it's used.
Social scientists work to understand systems and behaviours – why and how things work in societies. They therefore play a vital role in solving the many complex barriers that prevent potential solutions from being implemented. The research below includes studies ranging from why people choose certain behaviours over others, to how we can finance the transition in a just and equitable way.
Read more:
- SHORT ARTICLE: Addressing Modern Slavery
- Description
- Modern slavery has increasingly been linked to the environment; in particular environmental degradation and climate change. Modern slavery can be a driver of environmental change as well an outcome – changes in the environment can push people into situations where they may become vulnerable to modern slavery and vice versa. To address climate change, the impacts of modern slavery must be accounted for.
- SHORT ARTICLE: Faith for a Safe Climate Future
- Description
- The recent IPCC Working Group 1 report has made it clear that the climate crisis is not fundamentally a challenge of science but a challenge of our beliefs, commitments and actions. The UN Secretary General commented that "the evidence is irrefutable" and that the report sets out "a clear moral … imperative to protect the lives and livelihoods of those on the front lines of the climate crisis". With morality at the heart of the crisis, the question then arises: which organisations can help direct such action at the scale and speed required to avert climate catastrophe?
- PODCAST: Developing a sustainable food supply
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- Anne Touboulic and Festo Massawe from Nottingham's Future Food Beacon discuss the impacts of climate change on global food supplies and what can be done to help.
- Podcast: Modern slavery and the climate crisis
- Description
- Amanda is joined by Dr Bethany Jackson and Dr Jess Sparks from the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham. They dig deep into a discussion on modern slavery within the climate crisis and thus the modern slavery/climate change nexus.
- SHORT ARTICLE: Can our grandchildren help us fund the transition to net zero?
- Description
- We are taking rapid steps toward low emission technology. Government subsidies have supported much of this progress. Yet efforts to accelerate the transition face fierce political resistance, with opponents claiming that they would cost too much. Without stronger support, clean technology may arrive too late.
- POLICY PAPER: Addressing Modern Slavery at COP26
- Description
- Achieving the environmental SDGs must address modern slavery, through expanding collaborative action to centre the voices and rights of workers, communities, and survivors of modern slavery at all levels of legislation design and implementation.
- SHORT ARTICLE: Enhancing the resilience of smallholder communities in Tanzania
- Description
- These communities are particularly susceptible to chronic hunger, food insecurity, malnutrition and climate change. These problems can be visualised as a vicious circle between small-scale agriculture, rural poverty and climate vulnerability. Breaking this cycle is essential. This short article explores the issue.
- POLICY BRIEF: Incentivising reduced industrial emissions
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- Professor Robert McCorquodale explains how legal frameworks around human rights offer a means to incentivise corporate behaviour to protect the climate.
- BLOG: Unsustainable seafood supply chains
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- Seafood supply chains sustain three billion people nutritionally and also provide 10% of the world's population with employment. But they are dangerously unsustainable.
- BLOG: Global trading - the good, the bad and the essential
- Description
- This blog explores some of the flaws in our globalised food systems and the historical trading patterns upon which they are based, which have remained largely unquestioned for centuries. Food is essential but the way consumer demands have shaped our food systems through overproduction and consumption is not.