ECI Annual Review 2006/2007 - Environmental Change Institute ...

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The new UK Energy Research Centre’s mission is to be the UK’s pre-eminent centre of research and source of authoritative information and leadership on sustainable energy systems. UKERC undertakes worldclass research addressing wholesystems aspects of energy supply and use, while developing and maintaining the means to enable cohesive UK research in energy. As a lead partner of UKERC, ECI manages The Meeting Place which is the UK’s international gateway for the energy research community. Over the two years since its inception in October 2004, the Meeting Place has hosted 1,500 people from 35 countries at some 40 conferences and workshops. Several of these events have been jointly hosted with other institutions, for example, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Italian Government and the British Institute of Energy Economics. A diversity of audiences is one of the driving themes for the Meeting Place and these have included the ministries of G8+5; UK Government Departments (e.g. DTI, DfT, Defra); NGOs such as Transport 2000, Friends of the Earth and WWF; and academics from a wide range of disciplines. Businesses have come from a wide range of sectors including finance, construction, engineering, and transport, as well as energy, e.g. Arup, Barclays Capital, BMW, BP, Centrica, Corus, Crest Nicholson, E.ON , EcoSecurities, Faber Maunsell, Halcrow, Phillips, Pilkingtons, Prudential, Shell, SolarCentury, Taylor Woodrow, Whitby Bird, and Woolwich. The Meeting Place uses a wide variety of meeting formats to bring together these diverse audiences and promote effective interdisciplinary working, including: large conferences; short brainstorming audio-conference sessions; series of small workshops spread over several months; medium-sized residential workshops, lasting several days; and longer visits by international visitors lasting several weeks or months. The vast and diverse array of facilities offered by the departments and colleges of Oxford University are a valuable resource in this regard, although the Meeting Place is able to host events at other UK venues. A flavour of Meeting Place activities since its inception include: • the Climate Change Metrics 2day workshop, November 2004, Oxford. This event brought together experts from many different professions and disciplines to debate the merits of different climate change metrics options to enable inclusion of other sectors and greenhouse gases in the EU emissions trading scheme, particularly aviation and methane. • the G8+ 5 Energy Research and Innovation Workshop (WIRE), May 2005, Oxford, co-sponsored by the DTi and Defra. This major international workshop brought together senior policy officials and researchers from G8 nations, plus five developing nations (Mexico, South Africa, China, India and Brazil) to discuss collaboration on clean energy and innovation. • the Italian Carbon Capture and Clean Coal workshop, February 2006, London. This international workshop, hosted jointly with the Italian Embassy, aimed to strengthen UK/ Italian collaboration as a basis for submitting joint projects under the EU’s 7th Framework programme. • • the Innovation and Energy Systems research workshop series, March-September 2006, Oxford. This two-part intensive, collaborative and researchfocused activity brought together leading representatives from economic, institutional and management perspectives to describe their respective approaches to innovation in energy systems, share knowledge and insights, and come to a greater degree of common understanding. The output of this series of workshops is a peerreviewed book. Annual UKERC Summer School, July 2006, Edinburgh. This annual activity brings together around 25 UK-based doctoral students working on interdisciplinary energy issues to undertake a oneweek intensive energy training programme. This event is run in parallel with the UKERC general assembly, also managed by the Meeting Place. Details of Meeting Place events, including outputs such as reports, are available from the website: www.ukerc.ac.uk The Meeting Place: • is dedicated to furthering policy and research agendas through interdisciplinary problem-solving events, networking activities and interactions with international visitors. • provides a forum for proactive debate of energy policy issues • pursues activities based on proposals received from members of the energy research community. • operates as an activity development and management service, rather than a permanent physical location, so providing flexibility in the location and format of events. • brings together people from many different disciplines and professions that would not normally meet or work together.
Ecosystems: Conservation Practice ‘Song of the Cities’: A marketled conservation response to the bird-trade in Indonesia Drs Paul Jepson and Richard Ladle (Oxford University Centre for the Environment, ECI/Geography) Bird-keeping is hugely popular in the cities of Java and Bali and vast numbers of birds are taken from the wild each year. This project, funded by the Darwin Initiative, is assessing the efficacy of switching the supply chain from wild-caught to captivebred birds. A particular innovation is to extend the consumer-choice ‘pull’ approach of market-based mechanisms to include broader collective action whereby hobbyists mobilise for change. The research has involved qualitative and quantitative research on key aspects of the birdkeeping pastime. At the centre of this research has been a major household survey in six cities on Java and Bali. The market-research company ACNielsen shared with us their sampling frame and protocol and as a result we have a robust data set that enables statistical projections to the population. Headline results are that 1 in 3 households in the six cities keep a bird and nearly 1 in 7 have kept a bird at sometime in the last ten years. Over 1.4 million of the birds kept are wild-caught but similar numbers are captive-bred. Four of the most popular wild-caught birds are favourites at bird song-contests. The 450 song contests organised in Java and Bali bring together people from all ethnicities and backgrounds in a common interest. Songbird keepers in the six cities spend approximately £43 million a year on their hobby. Of this £14 million is spent on birds, nearly £9 million on live-food and £4.5 million on cages. The hobby makes substantial economic and livelihood contributions. Birdbreeding business models underline these insights. Many are social enterprises, in that they deliver Environmental Science and Policy Journal For five years ECI has been hosting the Editorial Office of the journal Environmental Science and Policy, published by Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher. During these five years the peer-reviewed journal has doubled in size and submissions have more than quadrupled. With a rejection rate of 70% now and the achievement of a Citation Index rating, ‘ESP’ has an increasing reputation. Distinctively the journal focuses on links between environmental science and policy, and is concerned with reaching beyond the academic community, involving experts and practitioners in government, business and industry, and non-governmental organisations who are instrumental in the solution of environmental problems. ESP seeks to advance interdisciplinary research of international policy relevance on a range of environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity, environmental pollution and waste, renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, and the interactions between these issues. It emphasises the links between these environmental issues and social and economic issues such as production, transport, consumption, growth, demographic changes, well-being, and health. However, subject coverage is not restricted to these issues and the introduction of new dimensions is encouraged. The journal also publishes a number of Special Issues each year. Recent and forthcoming Special Issues include: • Assessing climate change effects on land use and ecosystems in Europe. • Options for including land-use activities in a post-2012 inter- social benefits as well as profits. Bird breeding is labour intensive and generates employment in the community for the old, young, disabled and uneducated. A key insight emerging from this research is that catching birds from the wild, whilst contributing a livelihood supplement to some people, undermines the potential to create a bird-breeding industry that would provide large numbers of jobs for urban and rural Indonesians. The second phase of the project will involve a social marketing campaign: developing a system to certify captive-bred birds and activities to expand bird-breeding. Our research has shown that the key conditions necessary to ‘switch’ a supply chain from wild-caught to commercial breeding are present in Java. With the right investments and tenacity we can imagine a time 10-15 years hence where an appreciation of birds remains central to the Javan and Balinese cultural identities but where catching wild birds is unthought-of. • • national climate agreement. Biodiversity and land use in Europe. Reconciling the supply of, and demand for, science with a focus on carbon cycle research. ECI research leaders have been Guest Editors for some of these Special issues. Notably Dr Pam Berry co-edited Assessing Climate Change Effects on Land Use and Ecosystems in Europe (vol 9 issue 2, 2006) based on the ACCELERATES research programme in which ECI had been prominent. Three papers from that issue are among ESP’s top five in terms of online readership. The Editor-in Chief is Professor Jim Briden, former ECI Director. He can be contacted at esp@eci.ox.ac.uk and further details of the journal are at www.ees.elsevier.com/envsci.
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Page 5 and 6: News from the Director Diana Liverm
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Page 9 and 10: Climate Mitigation Research The att
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Page 39 and 40: Tipping Point 2006: Climate and Art

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