Leadership in energy
Leadership in energy
Date: 14th May, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM AWST
Venue: Online Event
Climate change policy targets necessitate rapid and deep decarbonisation of energy sectors globally. In this talk, Prof. Devine-Wright will critically discuss the challenges this poses for policy and practice, and for social science.
Prof. Devine-Wright will share a new Place-based, Just Transition framework that arose from four UK social science research projects funded as part of the IDRIC consortium. The framework is a tool for policy and industry that can integrate often overlooked social dimensions of industrial decarbonisation - particularly the lived experiences, knowledges and perspectives of communities hosting infrastructure projects such as Hydrogen and CCUS - at an earlier stage of technology planning and deployment.
He will discuss ‘extractive’ research practices in energy social science, offering critical reflections on ‘parachute’ projects that fail to offer reciprocity to communities who provide data for research. He will share a set of principles that are relevant to different aspects of the research ecosystem, from funders, to University research groups and individual researchers.
Collectively, these social science frameworks and principles can recast technology deployment as an act of place-making with the potential to deliver greener, fairer and more resilient communities, and ensure social science research contributes to, rather than undermines, just energy transitions.
Speakers
Professor Patrick Devine-Wright , Professor of Human Geography, University of Exeter
Patrick Devine-Wright's research has been ranked in the world's top 1% of social science according to citation of publications in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. With expertise spanning Human Geography and Environmental Psychology, he conducts theoretically-driven research with real-world implications, often in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary settings. Active across local, national and international contexts, he is engaged in efforts to ensure social science insights inform decision making on a range of environmental challenges, notably climate change. Patrick is Director of the £6.25m ESRC-funded ACCESS network that champions the visibility, impact and use of social science to tackle environmental problems.
Professor Peta Ashworth OAM, Director, Curtin Institute for Energy Transition
Professor Ashworth is a renowned expert in energy, communication, stakeholder engagement, and technology assessment. She has researched public attitudes towards climate and energy technologies, including wind, carbon capture and storage (CCS), solar photovoltaic, storage, geothermal and hydrogen, for almost two decades. An accomplished speaker and educator, she actively promotes energy literacy globally and contributes to policy briefings and educational events.