The Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) has published the UK Government’s climate and nature public participation plan: Energising Britain. Professors Patrick Devine-Wright, Karen Bickerstaff, Lorraine Whitmarsh (ACCESS Leadership Team) and Nigel Gilbert (ACCESS Co-Investigator) contributed to the plan through roundtable sessions organised by DESNZ and the British Academy this year, as did […]
Dr Najma Mohamed is Head of Nature-Based Solutions at the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) at the University of Cambridge. Dr Mohamed delivered a keynote at this year’s ACCESS Annual Assembly 2025 on ‘Putting People at the Heart of Place-Sensitive Just Transitions‘. We interviewed her afterwards, asking about her academic journey, […]
I gave a seminar a few weeks ago at the invitation of Prof. Tim Mays, a hydrogen engineer from the University of Bath. The audience was public and varied, with a large smattering of natural science students. Putting my slides together, I asked myself, what have I, as a social scientist interested in sustainable energy […]
In 2024, feedback from the ACCESS Annual Assembly was clear, there was a lack of racial and ethnic diversity among attendees, speakers, and within the project’s wider network which needed to be addressed (see also Golding et al., 2025). The ACCESS team had already acknowledged this gap but what changed following the 2024 Assembly, was […]
This year I was successful in being promoted to Professor of Environmental Psychology at the University of Portsmouth. I have been asked to pen a few words to chart my journey to this point, so read on if you want to learn more – including how I first met ACCESS’s illustrious co-directors. My journey to […]
As an ACCESS Knowledge Exchange Fellow, I contributed to the design, execution, and analysis of a survey and interviews on interdisciplinary working and the benefits of environmental social science, as well as supporting key project outputs like the annotated bibliography, literature review, and the Environmental Social Science kNowledge Exchange Map of Opportunities (ESS NEMO). Being […]
Karen’s piece on the FST blog argues that the solution to the net zero challenge lies more in socio-technical interventions that enable adjustments to how we live, rather than in purely technological interventions that sustain current patterns of demand and expectations around consumption, and she stresses that social science research is critical in supporting such […]
Perhaps evolving out of an early research focus on the culture of estuarine landscapes, I have always had an interest in liminal places and in-between spaces. In my current role as an ACCESS KEIF (Knowledge Exchange and Impact Fellow), I spend much of my time trying to make sense of the critical space in-between [social] […]
It was a response specifically to Clause 22 of the bill: ‘Benefits for homes near electricity transmission projects’, which suggests provision for a financial benefit scheme based on individuals living within a fixed distance (500m) of transmission infrastructure. Patrick and Rebecca argued that using a set distance to determine community benefits is inequitable and risks […]
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