Understanding Risk: Climate Change and Energy Choices
This Leverhulme Trust funded project aims to theoretically and empirically investigate understandings, conceptualisations and responses to climate change within existing and emerging energy policy framings.
In doing so we will also draw upon, and elaborate, social science theory:
• on attitudes, social representations, discourses and risk acceptance
• on place, hazard proximity and perceptions of risk
• on the relationship between risk perceptions and trust in institutions.
We will investigate a range of case study domains within the course of this project including those of:
• Nuclear energy
• Renewable approaches
• Conventional fuels
• Demand management.
Over four years, this interdisciplinary programme of research will explore the following questions:
A) Science-Policy Representations and Frames of the Climate-Energy Debate.
What are the dominant science and policy discourses and frames for understanding the contemporary energy debate?
B) Mapping Public Responses and Understandings.
How are the British public(s) understanding, conceptualising and responding to the new and emerging spectrum of framings of energy policy?
What risks and benefits do they perceive? Who do they trust? What other factors do they see as important in the acceptability of different energy futures?
C) The Impacts of Proximity.
To what extent does proximity (most typically defined in terms of spatial proximity) modify the ways in which energy issues and key frames are interpreted by people?
D) Deliberating Frames and Making Trade-Offs.
To what extent do people recognize value, buy into and make tradeoffs between alternative visions for energy futures? Particularly when they are given sufficient time to deliberate the issues.
The research team
Irene Lorenzoni, Jacquie Burgess, Mike Hulme and Tee Rogers-Hayden constitute the programme team at the School of Environmental Sciences (University of East Anglia). The programme overall is directed by Nick Pidgeon at Cardiff University, in collaboration with J. Richard Eiser at the University of Sheffield.
For more information about this project and our partners, please contact:
Contact: Irene Lorenzoni, Tee Rogers-Hayden, Jacquie Burgess.
And visit the dedicated Understanding Risk research group website hosted by Cardiff University
Sponsors
