Sub themes

Transforming Society and Environment

The incoming years or decades are critical for realisation of major shifts in the dematerialisation of economic activity as limits in resource availability and changes in earth systems become apparent.

Emerging social science seeks to understand processes of societal transformation, beyond incremental changes in behaviour or institutions.

This theme seeks to promote integrative scholarship on how understanding experience, steering institutions and stimulating debate on transformation in the context of environmental challenges.

Individual Action, Collective Consequences

Many environmental dilemmas are assumed to result from the distance between actions and consequences - separation in space and time of actions that bring benefits and the negative environmental consequences.

This theme builds on significant expertise across social psychology, human geography and political science to explore ethical, social and psychological dimensions of this framing of environmental problems, inviting discussion of new means of reconciling consumption, environmental values, and the means by which individual behaviour itself could be transformed.

Demographic Insights into Environmental Change

The growth in global human population is most often singled out as a major driver of environmental change. This theme questions that reading of the problem by analysing dimensions of demographic change from multiple disciplines and perspectives.

Research examines the role of migration in managing environmental risks; legal and political dimensions of international migration; and the links between ecosystem services and migration and mobility. Theme researchers contributed to the UK Government Office of Science major report on Migration and Global Environmental Change.

The theme analyses life-course dimensions of environmental change including:

• Equity across generations,
• stewardship and environmental ethics,
• how perceptions of environmental risks evolve over time, and,
• issues of place attachment and identity.

Resilience, Adaptation and Risk

Environmental change is manifest in changing variability and in unforeseen risks that affect the landscape of decision-making as well as the sustainability of social ecological systems.Resilience is the ability of societies to deal with risks and still retain their core purpose as well as undertake progressive change. The theme therefore engages with dimensions of environmental risks, how they are constructed in society, and models of decision-making.

When is a society resilient and who wins and loses from such resilience being an explicit goal of policy and collective action? The research builds on links through the Resilience Alliance and ongoing funded research on urban, water and other environmental systems, to promote new dimensions of resilience social science, including work on environmental hazards, political economy of decision-making, and how individual and community resilience is constructed and portrayed within narratives.