Sociology and Social Policy researchers work to find solutions to the climate crisis

As the University of Leeds hosts Climate Week, we look at how researchers in the School of Sociology and Social Policy are helping find solutions to the challenges caused by climate change.

Climate Week is a week-long event dedicated to sustainability, engagement, and positive change on our campus. 

While sociology might not seem an obvious area for climate change research, the following work demonstrates how sociologists are shedding light on the problems contributing to and arising from climate change.

Local investment in green projects

Professor Mark Davis delivers his inaugural lecture

Professor Mark Davis, Deputy Head (Strategy) in the School of Sociology and Social Policy heads up an innovative green finance project that piloted a new form of crowdfunding for local net-zero projects.

Building on research that found local authorities did not have the financial capacity to deliver the changes required to reach net-zero in their communities, Mark worked with local authority partners in Bristol, the Isle of Wight and Leeds, as well as  Abundance Investment and the public sector organisation Local Partnerships to co-create a solution.

The result was Community Municipal Investments (CMIs) (more commonly known as Local Climate Bonds), a form of crowdfunding in which local people invest in their council’s green projects. So far, Local Climate Bonds have raised over £11 million across the UK for local net zero projects.

What is really stopping us from retrofitting our homes?

Fitting insulation in homes. Image: Erik Mclean, Unsplash

Professor Mark Davis, and his colleague Professor Lucie Middlemiss (School of Earth and Environment) led a UK-wide team (funded by UKERC) looking at the installation of energy efficiency measures in domestic buildings.

They found that energy efficiency upgrades (‘retrofit’) via Government schemes fail because they assume a rational actor model of human behaviour and so privilege financial incentives, overlooking relational factors, like building trust with trades and new technology to meet real energy needs. Relations of money, identity, community and family/friends all play a significant role in decisions over renovation so scaling retrofit needs to leverage these relational packages.

Mark has worked with three combined Yorkshire authorities and Lloyds Banking Group to develop their retrofit offering in order to drive up retrofit delivery across the region.

Local solutions to the triple emergencies

Remaking Places workshop

Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy Dr Katy Wright is one of the academics behind the interdisciplinary network Remaking Places, which aims to support locally-based coalitions to find solutions to tackle the emergencies of our time.

Offering a transdisciplinary approach, research is framed through the triple emergencies of nature, species, and habitat loss, social and economic inequalities, and climate.

The network aims to drive system change across a number of key place-based areas that make up a good life, including reducing car dependency, creating affordable energy, investing in local infrastructure, developing sustainable housing and regenerating nature.

Currently, the Remaking Places team are in the final stages of developing a card game for facilitating cross-sectoral conversations about transformative projects, in partnership with Research Retold. To find out more about the network, and to join, you can visit their website.

Acting on climate change – perceptions of possibility, complexity and constraint, and policy

In their research, reported in their recent paper in Environmental Sociology Professor Sarah Irwin and Dr Katy Wright from the School of Sociology and Social Policy challenge conventional framings of citizens’ perceptions of climate change. They argue for more sufficient explanation of how citizens engage with possibilities for acting on climate change.

Policies which seek to change individual level behaviours place responsibility on citizens who, commonly, already feel more responsibility than efficacy.

Despite extensive concern about climate change, people talk about it less than might be expected, something commentators find puzzling. In their paper in Sociology, Wright and Irwin explore the social and relational contexts in which people talk about climate change, and self silence, and offer new sociological insights into the question of why climate talk is less pervasive than climate change concern.

How should politicians communicate about climate policies?

Road closed due to flooding. Image: Jevanto Protography, Adobe Stock

Professor Sarah Irwin  and Dr Lone Sorensen from the School of Media and Communication carried out a small pilot research project examining public views of the cost of living crisis and climate policies. From their findings laid out in a brief report, they identified a set of recommendations for climate communication:

• Climate communication should focus on immediate solutions to climate and cost-of-living issues while considering long-term goals.
• Communication should be transparent, connect evidence to people’s daily lives, and emphasize local action.
• Public engagement should be two-way process. The public (including marginalized voices) should be listened to, and follow-up communications put in place to demonstrate that their views are valued.
• Effective communication requires thoughtful, inclusive strategies.

Sociology is often centrally concerned with social inequalities, another important theme for climate research. In the SPA article, ‘Addressing hardship and climate change: Citizens’ perceptions of costs of living, social inequalities and priorities for policy’, Professor Irwin argues that: 

climate policy making should engage more fully with contexts of social inequality and that social wellbeing and systematic action on climate change need to be treated by policy makers and politicians as profoundly interlinked challenges.

Climate change and agricultural shifts

Rewilding, often proposed as a response to the environmental crisis, involves restoring landscapes and ecosystems to their natural state.

A forthcoming book by Associate Professor Dr Roxana Barbulescu and colleagues from Central and Eastern Europe examines the impact of demographic decline caused by rural migration.

Contrary to expectations, this decline does not lead to rewilding or mitigate climate change; instead, it exacerbates environmental degradation as departing communities are replaced by large agribusinesses, accelerating ecological impoverishment through intensive farming.

Drawing on research from a 2023 international workshop in Southern Transylvania, the book explores three interrelated themes: agricultural migration and emergent neo-peasantries, global food regime interdependencies, and ecological crises arising from shifting food production practices and the erosion of community-led environmental stewardship.

At the same time, Dr Bethany Robertson’s research explores identities and inequalities in UK agriculture, including how farmers respond to changes in policy. She found that women farmers often lead work around conservation due to gendered notions of care, as well as that farmers’ communication of ‘good farming’ responds to shifting public attitudes and priorities set by subsidies towards net-zero, biodiversity and sustainable supply chains.

Further information

You can find updates on Mark Davis’s Local Climate Bonds work here (via Green Finance Institute) and on his Relational approach to Retrofit here. Mark can be found on LinkedIn.

Katy Wright can be found on LinkedIn here.

For more information on Sarah Irwin and Katy Wright’s work on personal responsibility and the climate crisis, see here.

Information on Roxana Barbulescu and Bethany Robert’s latest research project Feeding the Nation is here.