Delivering Ecological Justice

This project’s overarching objectives are to facilitate knowledge growth and research capability in Egypt around the use of digital technology in preserving, protecting, and sustaining the tangible and intangible heritage of Luxor. The project aims to protect heritage context to ensure the local culture remains meaningful and memorable for local people.

Find out more about Luxor Living Lab.

Work within this sub-theme applies rapidly advancing ecological understandings to a range of natural and human modified landscapes to enable better actions that optimise landscape multi functionality, balancing nature conservation and societal demands, to better inform policymakers and practitioners.

Find out more about Community and Ecosystem Ecology.

This work examines how indigenous African crops became marginalised and ‘under-utilised’ during colonial times and explores futures of these crops in two regions of Kenya. It is funded by the British Academy under their ODA Interdisciplinary Research Projects scheme. Collaborators include the National Museums of Kenya.

This funding enabled the research team to produce a complete set of community engagement tools and materials for improved communication, information dissemination, and collaboration with the public with the Lincoln Climate Commission.

The project led to extensive public consultation over Summer of 2022 where the Commission started to design a consensus-based framework of actions in the form of a climate assembly process that enabled and delivered a range of climate conversations with members of the community, public policies, research, and investment to deliver a net zero carbon and resilient transition for Greater Lincolnshire.

Find out more about Engagement tools for the Lincoln Climate Commission.

This research has established and is currently delivering an assembly process for Lincoln. It is building and enhancing new and existing relations to kickstart a community policy engagement network related to climate action across the city of Lincoln, by building a Lincoln-wide policy engagement stakeholder network through a number of mini events as part of Lincoln’s climate assembly process.

The process was initially designed to build on the aims of the 2030 Lincoln Climate Action Plan which was published in 2022. Through multi-governance facilitation of the assembly process through the Lincoln Climate Commission, LocalMotion UK, and Lincoln City Council, the aim was to facilitate community ownership in driving the assembly agenda by having a range of mini events related to climate action across the city to align and reconnect disparate climate networks that could feed into more effective and holistic climate policymaking for the city.

Find out more about Lincoln’s Climate Assembly Process.

This Policy insight case study gathered evidence on the governance, policy, networked, and scalar relationships between climate commissions and local, national, and international climate agendas through three research questions:

1. What are UK climate commissions doing to address local climate mitigation/adaptation through the lens of ‘place-shaping’? (Place/ Governance/Policy) 
2. How are commissions adopting an inclusive/pluralistic approach when engaging different sectors through place-based governance innovations? (Place/Networks) 
3. How are these innovations shaping (or being shaped by) local, national, and international climate policy agendas (Place/Scale)

The final report for this project will be published by the British Academy in August 2024.

Marine ecosystems and biodiversity are facing an unprecedented crisis. The international legal architecture for ocean governance is failing because its jurisdictional structures and substantive rules are not aligned with the natural reality of ocean systems and do not distribute the benefits of ocean resources in an equitable way.

This research investigates how to transform ocean law by challenging accepted paradigms, goals, and values of ocean law with the aim of constructing a new vision and approach to its development. A key innovation of this research will be to draw upon progressive legal concepts from the broader corpus of international and national environmental law, and international human rights, and apply these to achieve more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable ocean governance. It will also investigate legal traditions and critical perspectives that have largely been excluded from mainstream ocean discourse, for example indigenous perspectives, rights for nature, and stewardship. It will explore how these innovative concepts could be applied to reimagine ocean law across three thematic areas including fisheries, area-based management (including marine protected areas), and a new international treaty for marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction through the lens of Aotearoa and the Pacific.