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Dr Iestyn Woolway

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Lakes are highly sensitive to changes in climate, making them powerful indicators of environmental shifts. This talk will explore how lake ecosystems respond to rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and human activities. Through case studies and recent research, we will examine the role of lakes in detecting early signs of climate change, highlighting their importance in ecosystem monitoring and policy decision-making.

The seminar will discuss into the science behind how lakes respond to shifting environmental conditions, offering valuable insights for researchers, environmental scientists, and policy makers. Recommended for those interested in climate science, freshwater ecosystems, and environmental monitoring.

Dr Iestyn Woolway, Reader at ��ɫֱ��’s School of Ocean Sciences, is an expert in the field of climate change impact assessment, with much of his time is dedicated to the study of global environmental change. He has done pioneering work in applying state-of-the-art techniques, including artificial intelligence for integrating field-based observations with satellite data and model simulations, to answer key questions that relate to climate change. His work provides insights into how climate change will impact the environment providing roadmaps to resource managers tasked with accounting for ecosystem climate vulnerability. PhD from University College London. Post-doc at the University of Reading, and research fellowships in Ireland as well as at the European Space Agency.

Dr Candice Howarth

LSE Grantham Research Institute

Extreme heat is becoming a significant concern to the United Kingdom (UK) with a lack of urgency when it comes to preparedness. The UK experienced five heatwave periods in summer 2022 with record-breaking temperatures of over 40ºC in England, leading to almost 3,000 deaths. The extreme heat experienced was a 1-in-1,000-year event, made 10 times more likely by anthropogenic climate change. Yet, the record-breaking temperatures of 2022 could be considered an average year by 2060 and a cool year by 2100. Thus, while heat is a relatively new risk for the UK, it is becoming an increasingly stark reality with over 50,000 heat-related deaths recorded between 1988 and 2022. There is a deeper, more pressing issue, which is to consider how efforts to design adaptation to extreme heat will not hinder progress on mitigation by further increasing greenhouse gas emissions. For example, use of air conditioning may be the only viable adaptation to keep people cool in the UK where the building stock is not designed to keep people cool in the summer. This could increase energy usage, sitting at odds with efforts to reduce energy consumption and undermining efforts to achieve the UK’s net zero target. Thus, there is now a great need to consider adaptation and mitigation as complementary activities and to understand how the public perceives this. This presentation will share insights from two case studies exploring this. The first is a survey on public perceptions to extreme heat conducted in August 2023 with 1,750 respondents from a representative sample of the UK population. In this first case study, we explore the extent to which the UK public are aware of the impacts of extreme heat and whether approaches to reduce the effects of extreme heat can occur without increasing emissions. The second case study seeks to understand how action on adaptation and mitigation efforts can be combined to adopt a ‘climate-resilient net zero’ approach to tackling extreme heat in London. In this second case study, we explore the practicalities around incorporating climate adaptation to extreme heat into emergency response and planning, and seek to understand the experiences of those responding to emergency situations during periods of extreme heat.

Insights from these two research projects exploring how to manage the impacts of extreme heat whilst minimising greenhouse gas emissions have significant potential to inform policy and decision-making, emergency responses and effective communication and public engagement.

Bio:

Dr Candice Howarth is the Head of Climate Adaptation and Resilience at the LSE Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, she oversees the Institute’s work on extreme heat preparedness in the UK. She is leading a British Academy Fellowship in collaboration with the British Red Cross looking at integrating adaptation and mitigation measures to enhance community preparedness to extreme heat. She is the UK lead for the Horizon 2020 €6,2 million riskADAPT project exploring adaptation solutions to climate impacts in the EU and she was the PI of the £3,5 million Place-based Climate Action Network (PCAN). She has led and contributed to projects totalling £12 million on local climate governance, resilience to extreme heat, where adaptation fits in climate governance and how co-production of knowledge can be used to better inform climate decision-making. She has an interdisciplinary background in climate policy and pro-environmental behaviour with degrees in meteorology (BSc), climate change (MSc) and a PhD in climate policy and pro-environmental behaviour. She co-leads the Adaptation Community of Practice, chairs the Royal Geographical Society Climate Change Research Group, sits on the Royal Meteorological Society Climate Science Engagement group, is a member of the London Heat Risk Group and was a member of the Steering Group of the Physiological Society’s Heat Resilience Strategy. She was a contributing author for the 3rd UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA3) and is contributing to the fourth Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA4). She sits on the Editorial Board of the journal Environmental Communication and is an Associate Deputy Editor for the journal Climatic Change

• https://pcancities.org.uk/ 
• c.howarth@lse.ac.uk

Tony Roberts

Natural Resources Wales

Wild Landfill is a globally recognised gold standard delivering SMNR (Sustainable Management of Natural Resources) on brownfield sites and associated low grade land. It combines mosaic habitat development with multiple ecosystem service benefits, educational outreach and represents a new paradigm in the holistic approach to nature recovery and natural climate solutions. 

Discover the novel local approach to global problems. Addressing the twin climate and nature emergencies, combining local sustainable outcomes with a unique combination of applied industrial SMNR, and a unique partnership approach levering maximum sustainable habitat creation and educational and public outreach through use of media, animations and documentary film. The session will include a Q&A session with Wild Landfill Founder, Tony Roberts. 

Interested parties can check out the Wild Landfill Web Site to gain a more compete understanding of the project: 

Neal Haddaway

We are in an unprecedented period of environmental loss: extreme climate events, insect declines, deforestation, temperature records, and forest fires feature ever more frequently in the news. Predictions of the impacts of unchecked human development are dire and increasingly point to catastrophe without urgent and drastic system-level change. And yet, little changes. Scientists, decision-makers, and activists know the situation well, and as the public becomes increasingly aware of the state of the planet, our increased collective understanding can bring a great sense of loss. We are seeing more references in mainstream media to climate anxiety, ecological grief and climate emotions. In this talk, I will share my experiences with grief as an environmental scientist, and my research and photographic work with climate emotions, exploring what it means to grieve for the planet. Public discourse on emotional responses to the planetary crises is often polarised into narratives of ‘hopium’ and ‘doomerism’. Here, I will explain why I think we need a more nuanced and understanding view of the emotions that arise as we know more about the state of the planet - ‘gnostalgia’ (gnosis, knowledge - algos, pain). 

Neal Haddaway is an environmental photographer and researcher from the UK. After a 20-year career in environmental research, he turned to photography as a medium for societal change. His work explores the role contemporary human society plays in the destruction of nature, and the emotional toll caused by a scientific awareness of the impending planetary crises. His work has been published in newspapers (The Guardian, The Evening Standard, The Times) and magazines (Artefact, Next Blue, Anthroposphere), featured in solo exhibitions at the UN Stockholm50+ conference (June 2022) and the Royal Geographical Society (June 2023), and has been shortlisted for the Earth Photo Prize 2023.

This talk will appeal to anyone ware of the crises facing the planet, particularly those experiencing or curious about the emotional toll of an awareness of the destruction that human development is having on the world.

Dr Japhy Wilson

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This paper begins from the assumption that there is no solution to climate change within the parameters of global capitalism, and asks what the urban cutting edge of our combined and uneven apocalypse can tell us about the nature of this system, and the possibility of moving beyond it. It explores the monstrosity of capital through a surrealist ethnography of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon: an extractivist metropolis that embodies what Nancy Fraser calls cannibal capitalism, and that seems to confirm David Harvey’s suggestion that capitalism is too monstrous to survive. But a consideration of the radical art and street culture of the city suggests that Harvey’s claim is less self-evident than it seems. The libidinal investment of the subaltern inhabitants of Iquitos in extractive forms of capital accumulation indicates that capitalism may instead be too monstrous to fail. On the other hand, the demonic carnival rituals through which these same inhabitants celebrate their right to a city built on the murderous enslavement of their ancestors, and deliriously subvert their own monstrous pathologization in forms of collective expenditure, suggest that capitalism is perhaps not monstrous enough, and prefigure the ecstatic rebel monstrosity of cannibal communism. 

Jenny Wong

The message for the need for action on climate change goes to everyone – but much of dialogue on what  to do next has been captured by ‘policy-makers’ supported by research focused on behaviour change as a response to incentives intended to lever pre-defined actions. There is little research looking at what people are doing on their own initiative and why let alone what impact this maybe having on broader climate change objectives. This seminar explores how people individually and collectively are responding to the dual pressures of climate change and cost of living in relation to impacts on woodlands in Wales and how this is worth closer examination.

Aaron Thierry

Cardiff University

Despite thousands of higher education institutions (HEIs) having issued Climate Emergency declarations, most academics continue to operate according to ‘business-as-usual’. However, such passivity increases the risk of climate impacts so severe as to threaten the persistence of organised society, and thus HEIs themselves. This seminar explores why a maladaptive cognitive-practice gap persists and asks what steps could be taken by members of HEIs to activate the academy.

Drawing on insights from climate psychology and sociology, we argue that a process of ‘socially organised denial’ currently exists within universities, leading academics to experience a state of ‘double reality’ that inhibits feelings of accountability and agency, and this is self-reenforcing through the production of ‘pluralistic ignorance’. We further argue that these processes serve to uphold the cultural hegemony of ‘business-as-usual’ and that this is worsened by the increasing neo-liberalisation of modern universities. Escaping these dynamics will require deliberate efforts to break taboos, through frank conversations about what responding to a climate emergency means for universities’ – and individual academics’ – core values and goals.

Aaron is currently a post-graduate researcher at Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, affiliated to the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD), where he's investigating how climate scientists conceive of their ethical responsibilities and how the norms in science around activism and advocacy are changing.

Prior to this he's worked as an ecological scientist, science communicator and environmental campaigner. His past experiences, including time spent doing field work in the Arctic, have given him a first hand view of the frontlines of the climate crisis, and this has led him to become fascinated by the question of how to accurately convey scientific warnings of environmental risks in ways that help wake the public to action.