Economics and Policy for Sustainability
Our internationally leading research group examines the implications of economic activities and policies for sustainability. Our expertise ranges from political, institutional and evolutionary theories to macro-economic analyses and methods, such as input-output analysis, carbon accounting and resource flow analysis. We use this wide-ranging expertise to investigate the implications of diverse policy alternatives and governance issues for achieving sustainable development. Our research encompasses areas such as:
- Policy appraisal for sustainability
- Institutional analysis of environmental governance institutions
- Innovation systems and processes for a transition to a low carbon economy
- Multi-regional environmentally extended input-output analysis
- Cross-country and time-series analysis of economic growth and resource use
- Trade analysis of extractive and other industries
- Sustainable consumption and production modelling
- Hybrid life cycle analysis, carbon and water foot-printing
- Reshaping economic incentives to reduce resource throughputs
- Modelling physical infrastructure and its future resource demands
- Marginal abatement costs at national and sub-national levels
- Economics of land and water management
- Valuation of ecosystem services and environmental quality
- Non-economic metrics of well-being and their relation to resource use
- Risk analysis
Our strength lies in the development of interdisciplinary empirical approaches for analysing current political issues such as natural resource management, climate change mitigation and adaptation and the provision of ecosystem services. While we have a strong focus on research, we also advise public bodies and engage with research users ranging from the City of Leeds and Leeds City Region Partnership to utilities, businesses, the UK Government and the European Environmental Agency. In addition, John Barrett and Dabo Guan are IPCC lead authors for the 5th Assessment Report, and Julia Steinberger is an author in the IIASA’s Global Energy Assessment.
We are involved in several large interdisciplinary projects funded by UK Research Councils and the European Commission. These include the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) where we are developing global trade models to understand the carbon embedded in trade and the impact of emerging energy technologies; the ESRC funded Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP), where we are investigating low-carbon skills challenges; and the Centre for Low Carbon Futures (CLCF), where we are examining a low carbon economy at a local level. We also contribute to the Research Councils Energy Programme, the EPSRC Energy and Complexity Programme and the EPSRC Resilient Infrastructures programme. We work closely with several Departments in the Faculty of Engineering on energy and infrastructure issues, and are a key part of the new Centre for Integrated Energy Research (CIER), working on research integrating technological, economics and policy, and socio-technical aspects of energy. We contribute to several large EPSRC funded research projects that consider low carbon pathways, energy futures for cities, multi-utility service companies and resilient infrastructures.
The group members regularly publish in top peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science, Global Environmental Change, Environmental Science and Technology, Science of the Total Environment, Environmental Science & Policy, Ecological Applications, Ecology and Society, Energy Policy, Journal of International Ecology and Ecological Economics.