Strategic Challenges

Environment, Energy and Resilience

By 2030 global demand for energy and food is predicted to double. A bigger world population, up by two billion, will put additional pressure on water and other resources. Environmental and climate change over the next 50 years will pose important threats, to food security, to health, and to economic prosperity around the world.

Urgent, dramatic and far reaching action is required now to mitigate and adapt to environmental change. Energy use, security and trade, food and water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are all social and economic issues. The recession throws into sharper relief whether we need to make trade-offs, or exploit synergies, between environmental goals and economic aspirations.

Social science has provided evidence on the costs of environmental change and the impacts of interventions to reduce emissions. It has led to new environmental and energy policy options. Challenges and questions include:

• How to underpin the transitions to a low carbon economy and a more climate resilient society
• Identifying ways to secure safe, sustainable and affordable energy, food and water supplies
• Understanding perceptions and beliefs around the value of energy and environmental goods and services
• Development of sustainable environmental practices and policies for international agencies, governments at multiple levels, business, communities and individuals, and the structural, institutional and behavioural changes needed to implement them
• How environmental knowledge is understood when the modern world suffers from 'information overload'
• Understanding perceptions of the risks from environmental change and natural hazards and development of interventions to strengthen resilience
• Shaping environmental regulation and the roles of governments, markets and civil society.

The ESRC will fund high impact research while developing theory and methods drawing on the full range of disciplines. We aim to build a new generation of skilled researchers and new data resources.

This challenge connects widely with others. Ensuring that recovery from the current global slowdown strengthens the emerging green economy, rather than undermining progress towards emission targets has links to , and .The link with is in understanding how population growth and movement challenge objectives for greater sustainability.There is also strong connectivity with in terms of the impacts of environmental change on energy and food security, and the need to strengthen the resilience of communities, businesses and individuals to environmental changes as well as other potential threats.

The ESRC will be deeply involved in the multi-agency Living with Environmental Change Programme, and the Research Councils' Energy Research Programme, where the social science contribution is critical to achievement of overall programme goals.We will work with the TSB, for example on its low carbon buildings innovation platform.

Achievements 2005-2008

• Advancing climate change policy by improving both the evidence base for decision-makers and the tools and
• Providing authoritative information and leadership on sustainable energy systems, through rigorous, interdisciplinary research that engages with policymakers and practioners to identify sustainable, economically efficent ways of achieving energy transition.
• Providing evidence on the sustainable development of food chains and rural land use, and engaging in an ambitious programme of related knowledge exchange with businesses and national and regional policymakers
• Contributing to processes and outcomes that are more resilient, sustainable, socially just and favourable for the poor through research that explores the pathways by which technologies, ecologies and social systems interact in development.

Priorities for 2009-2014

By 2014 the ESRC will have:

• Played a lead role in developing and delivering research on the drivers and implications of environmental change under conditions of uncertainty, the financing of sustainability, and on appropriate public and private responses to both mitigate and adapt to change
• Examined the impact of the economic downturn and measures to combat it on long-term environmental change goals
• Invested, with partners, in understanding how environmental behaviours, practices and policy can be changed to promote sustainable use of resources
• Collaborated internationally to understand the complex interdependence between alleviating global poverty, sustaining economic and social development, building societal resilience to environmental change and reducing the human impact on natural systems
• Funded research with other Research Councils and partners to increase food security in the UK and globally 
• Worked with the follow up to the Council for Science and Technology report on infrastructure to ensure integration of social and economic issues with the technological challenges
• Worked with partners on developing a common framework for geo-spatial data, which will enable better monitoring, simulation and development of interventions to promote sustainability
• Built research capacity through funding studentships and fellowships at the interface of environmental and social science jointly with the NERC.