Research themes | Research methods | Staffing and collaborative links | Current and recent projects
Environmental policy research is inherently concerned with links between society and the natural world. Human activities can have a profound influence on ecosystems, the climate and landscapes. Conversely, the natural world has an intrinsic value for aesthetic or recreational purposes and provides the resources upon which economic activities depend. The PSI Environment Group is dedicated to the analysis of the socio-economic causes of environmental impacts and the policies which may ameliorate them. It seeks to undertake policy-relevant research of the highest quality with a view to contributing to the maintenance and enhancement of the environment's contribution to human welfare, now and in the future.
The Environment Group's approach to the environment recognises the interaction at every level between the environment, the economy and society generally, and is therefore intrinsically interdisciplinary. Many projects are carried out in collaboration with others so that a range of perspectives can be taken for any given problem. The challenge of sustainable development underlines the fact that environmental policy must be firmly embedded in the wider social and economic context. The research of the Environment Group is located within, and seeks to contribute to the development of, thinking about sustainable development.
The objectives of the Environment Group are to analyse, investigate and understand:
The Environment Group has operated since Professor Jim Skea arrived at PSI as Director in November 1998. He was previously Leader of the Environment Programme at SPRU (Science and Technology Policy Research), University of Sussex and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC's) Global Environmental Change Programme. Along with a research assistant, various projects have been carried out including: Reducing Barriers to Energy Efficiency; The Development of Socio-Economic Scenarios for Climate Impact Assessment; The Implications for the UK of an International Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme; and a review of the Environment Agency's Sustainable Development Research Programme. Mayer Hillman, Senior Fellow Emeritus, also conducts research under PSI auspices.
With the arrival of Professor Paul Ekins as Group Head in late 2000, the work of the Environment Group has stepped up a gear. Paul is currently Professor of Sustainable Development at Keele University and is an Associate Director of the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future, which he co-founded with Jonathon Porritt and Sara Parkin. He has received the UNEP Global 500 Award "for outstanding environmental achievement".
The Environment Group is now developing a number of research areas, including resource productivity and technical change, environmental policy instruments, the governance of science and technology, scenarios of environmentally sustainable development, the social dimension of environmental policies, and conceptions and measures of quality of life.
In November 2000, the Sustainable Development Unit at the DETR commissioned PSI to facilitate a sustainable development research network with the goal of "strengthening the capacity for and delivery of high-quality cross cutting research in the UK relevant to the needs of those who must implement polices and decisions in the context of sustainable development". This project will run to March 2003 and will give PSI a pivotal, high-profile role in the sustainable development research community. The work involves collaboration with colleagues at the University of Westminster's Centre for Sustainable Development and the Centre of the Study of Environmental Change and Sustainability at the University of Edinburgh.
Another project, INTEREST - Insurance, Technological Risk and Emerging Science and Technology Policies has just started. The aim of this project is to obtain a better understanding of the role which the insurance sector and insurance-based mechanisms can play in relation to innovation which promotes, or challenges, sustainable development. Collaborators here include the International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics ("The Geneva Association") the University of Linköping, Gerling Insurance and the consultancy Technopolis.
The Environment Group is developing work clustered around six themes:
This theme is concerned with the prospects for, and strategies and policies to promote, step-changes in resource productivity and eco-efficiency. Possible projects relate to the analysis of resource flows, and research on the dissemination of environmental innovation and best practice, on measures of resource productivity and on the role of relative prices in stimulating technical innovation and more sustainable resource use.
If science and technology is to play its full potential role in enabling moves towards sustainable, new forms and patterns of intellectual enquiry, which challenge existing disciplinary and institutional boundaries are required. These will need to inform, and be supported by, new institutional frameworks and funding mechanisms. An issue of increasing importance in relation to science and technology is environmental and technological risk, which despite enormous advances in scientific knowledge, is still often characterised by significant scientific uncertainty or even ignorance, and is likely to remain so. Public acceptance of such risk, and therefore of the science and technologies with which it is associated, or the political will to respond to environmental challenges, depends on the development and use of more integrated, deliberative and participatory technological and environmental risk assessment techniques, which adequately integrate social, economic and environmental concerns. The Environment Group is active both in mapping and seeking to understand sustainable development research requirements and priorities, and in the area of technology and risk assessment.
Environmental policy is increasingly being designed with a mix of different instruments. A key focus in this theme will be implementation strategies for environmental taxes and other market-based instruments, based on research into the effects of such instruments in the past, and research which develops ways of addressing the economic and social concerns to which these instruments can give rise. Increasingly environmental policy is being implemented through packages of policy instruments, which seek to combine environmental effectiveness, economic efficiency and social equity. Research under this theme will relate to both designing and evaluating such packages.
The Environment Group has considerable experience in forecasting and scenario work related to sustainable development. It will build on this through projects which model the economic and environmental implications of policies promoting environmentally sustainable development, and which construct scenarios based on different assumptions about social, economic and environmental developments. These projects will include the formulation of sustainability scenarios for the UK, modelling regional environmental sustainability and analysis of the effectiveness of policies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
The social dimension of environmental policy includes at least four broad strands of consideration: social perceptions of such concepts as 'environment' and 'sustainable development'; the social behaviour which causes effects on the environment; the social impacts of policies which seek to ameliorate these effects; and the social processes through which environmental policies are constructed, deployed and evaluated. Current projects in this area are addressing the issue of a socially equitable allocation of resources to meet basic human needs, and exploring participatory processes in the context of public consultation, controversies and debates in the life sciences and technology assessment.
Increasing quality life economically, socially and environmentally is the goal of sustainable development, but quality of life is still a relatively diffuse and undefined concept. Research will seek to clarify the relative importance of various components of quality of life, and how they are related, and to develop measures and methods to facilitate its pursuit through public policy.
In addition to focusing on these six core themes, the Environment Group will work to interpret and bring into sharper relief the whole field of sustainable development research. It will maintain close contacts with both other researchers and research users, and engage in collaborative work in research areas, such as environment and trade, or the socio-economic implications of global climate change, which cut across or incorporate all the dimensions of sustainable development.
Environmental research at PSI employs a wide range of research methods, from formal modelling and scenario building to many styles of policy analysis and evaluation. A very wide range of data - economic, social and environmental - is relevant to environmentally sustainable development, and provides the empirical basis for the Group's research. A major objective of the Group is to clarify the scope of sustainable development research and to increase awareness of its significance.
The Environment Group currently consists of four staff: Professors Jim Skea and Paul Ekins, Dr Malcolm Eames and Dr Mayer Hillman. It also has a number of research associates through its close links with the Centre for Sustainable Development and the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. Individual researchers also maintain close links with the Huxley School at Imperial College, the Centre for Research into Environmental Sustainability at Keele University, SPRU at Sussex University, the Environment and Social Policy Research Unit at University College London, the Centre for Environmental Change and Sustainability at Edinburgh University, Cambridge Econometrics, the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future, and the Consumer Policy Institute at Brunel University.
| Kristina
Dahlstrom, Research Officer k.dahlstrom@psi.org.uk, tel 020 7468 2234 |
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| Expertise: Environmental issues, development. With a background in environment and development, Kristina has focused on the environmental evaluation of economic development and the institutions of development, with a particular interest in the fields of risk, hazards and vulnerability within this framework. | |||
| Simon
Dresner, Research Fellow s.dresner@psi.org.uk, tel 020 7468 2265 |
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| Expertise: Social and economic aspects of sustainability. His book 'The Principles of Sustainability' is to be published by Earthscan in 2002. Simon's particular research interest in recent years has been environmental taxation. He has coordinated an EC research project on social responses to ecological tax reform policies (PETRAS). At PSI, he is working on a project about ways to remove regressivity from environmental taxes. | |||
| Expertise: UK and European environmental policies
- implementation and efficiency issues; environmental regulation and management;
air quality management and industrial pollution control; participation and
decision-making; technological change and sustainable development; socio-economic
scenarios, futurity and technology assessment; agricultural, food and biotechnological
research policy. |
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| Professor
Paul Ekins, Head, Environment Group p.ekins@psi.org.uk, tel 020 7468 2276 |
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| Expertise: Sustainable development especially
in relation to environment-economy interactions and environmental policy,
including the areas of national environmental accounting; environmental
taxes and ecological tax reform; environment, globalisation and trade; energy
and environment; materials flow analysis; and sustainable economic growth
and sustainable development. |
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| Dr Mayer Hillman, Senior Fellow Emeritus mayer.hillman@blueyonder.co.uk, tel 020 7468 0468 |
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| Expertise: Energy conservation; walking and
cycling; road safety; climate change; health promotion; quality of life
issues; environmental and resource sustainability; green economics; children's
physical and social development; setting clocks forward. |
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| Professor
Jim Skea, Director, PSI j.skea@psi.org.uk, tel: 020 7468 2219 |
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| Expertise: Sustainable development, energy/environmental
policies; policies for global climate change; clean technology; environmental
regulation and technical change; business and the environment. |
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Associates |
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| Simon Joss | josss@westminster.ac.uk | ||
| Karen Lucas | lucask1@westminster.ac.uk | ||
| Andrew Ross | A.A.Ross@westminster.ac.uk | ||