Environment and Sustainability
Global cross-disciplinary research addressing sustainability challenges through innovative and collaborative social science.
Transitioning to a just and sustainable society is one of the defining challenges of our time. The Environment and Sustainability research group undertakes cross-disciplinary and global research on the theory, methods, and policies that shape social and environmental sustainability. The research spans diverse fields such as geography, economics, psychology, environmental science, sociology, and political science. Research focuses on sustainability challenges across multiple spatial and political scales: collaborating with researchers and stakeholders from the Global South across Asia and Africa, Europe, and local communities in Devon and Cornwall.
We co-create solutions with civil society and decision-makers to foster sustainability transitions, build resilience, and envision sustainable futures. We advance cutting-edge social science methods, including ethnographic, participatory, and large-scale survey approaches. The research focus includes energy transitions; land use change; marine and coastal resources and places; deliberative democratic approaches; demography, public health and migration; and the core of sustainability science.
Research group leads
Group members
Our research focuses on sustainability challenges at multiple spatial and political scales, working with researchers on common challenges across the Global South, Europe, through to key action research in Devon and Cornwall.
With partners across disciplines and world regions, our research:
- Co-creates research with civil society and key decision-makers around sustainability transitions, building resilience, and envisioning future sustainable worlds, including leading on the Climate Emergency initiatives of Devon.
- Develops state-of-the-art social science methods to generate new explanations of the unsustainability crises and practical solutions, from ethnographic, spatial, participatory and visual methods, to large-scale survey research.
- Contributes to national and global assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment.
- Develops long-term partnerships with leading sustainability research across the University of Exeter ( Energy Policy Group, Global Systems Institute, Environment and Sustainability Institute, Alan Turing Institute, European Centre for Environment and Human Health) and globally, for example with Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies Australia, Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, Sweden, Duke University, US and others.
