SoGE DPhil student Camila Ramos, based in the TSU, has been named as one of 2026's Remarkable Voices in Transport by the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI).
News
What's in a name? Belonging!
Dr Juan Pablo Orjuela has been working with low-income women in Itagüí, part of the Medellin metropolitan area (Colombia), but COVID-19 has brought new challenges on how to engage with communities in the midst of lockdown measures. Read his blog entry on the PEAKUrban website on how the co-creation of a group name and image has helped in the process.
Why Africa's heatwaves are a forgotten impact of climate change
Recent summers have demonstrated dramatically that heatwaves are not only deadly, but they are already being influenced by human-induced climate change. In this guest post for Carbon Brief, Luke Harrington and Friederike Otto explain why extreme heat events in sub-Saharan Africa are not routinely monitored, meaning that heat-related deaths are chronically underreported - putting even more people in danger.
Al Gore joins GOTO Climate Action Summit
Al Gore, the Former US Vice President, was the keynote speaker at the Oxford MBA Global Opportunities and Threats (GOTO) programme Climate Summit. In 2020 GOTO was co-led by Aoife Brophy Haney, lecturer in Innovation and Enterprise at the Smith School, and focused on the theme of climate action. The keynote lecture recording and transcript are available online.
Dr Raghav Pant Highly Commended in the 2020 Vice-Chancellor Innovation Awards
Congratulations to Dr Raghav Pant (Senior Research Associate, Environmental Change Institute) who has been Highly Commended in the Early Career category of the Vice-Chancellor Innovation Awards 2020 for his work on 'New modelling tools to help governments and decisions makers minimise the risks from infrastructure failures'
EU makes world's biggest 'green recovery' pledge - but will it hit the mark?
After 90 hours of intense negotiations, European Union leaders reached a COVID-19 recovery deal that included devoting nearly 550 billion euros to green projects over the next seven years - the largest single climate pledge ever made. With comment from Brian O'Callaghan, researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. [Reuters]
Eyes in the sky: Investors reach for new tools to gauge climate change risk
A growing network of asset managers, academics, start-up entrepreneurs and campaigners are working to harness an armada of recently deployed satellites to better predict the economic impact of global warming. At the forefront of this work, the Spatial Finance initiative - led by Ben Caldecott - explores the integration of geospatial analysis into financial decisions for information markets, financial products, and risk management. [Reuters]
Treat the System, Not the Symptoms: Covid-19 lessons for the Climate Crisis
The business response to Covid-19 can teach us vital lessons about the climate emergency, say Aoife Brophy Haney (Smith School and Said Business School) and Peter Drobac (Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship) in the Independent. Three features of business responses offer critical insights for ways to accelerate the response to the climate crisis: people, place and partnership.
Immediate action needed to stem the flow of plastic into the ocean, finds report
A new analysis by The Pew Charitable Trusts and SYSTEMIQ, in collaboration with the University of Oxford, the University of Leeds, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and Common Seas, found that the annual flow of plastic into the ocean could nearly triple by 2040. The release of this report coincides with the publication of 'Evaluating Scenarios Toward Zero Plastic Pollution', in the journal Science and co-authored by Richard Bailey (Professor of Environmental Systems).
Dr Emma Howard awarded the Royal Meteorological Society's prestigious Malcolm Walker prize
Dr Emma Howard, recent doctoral graduate from the African Climate team in SoGE and member of the UMFULA research project, has been awarded the Royal Meteorological Society's prestigious Malcolm Walker prize.
Pioneering food systems teaching programme steps into the virtual sphere
In response to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, the Interdisciplinary Food Systems Teaching and Learning (IFSTAL) programme held its first online summer school to resounding success at the end of June 2020. IFSTAL is coordinated by the Food Systems Transformation Group within the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.