‘Climate change: Reasons to be hopeful’

For many people and particularly the young, tackling climate change seems a hopeless case.

On a recent evening, with the sun sparkling on the waters of Bristol harbour, seven post graduate research students and a gang of supporters gathered in the Watershed ready to present their research to a public audience.

Researchers represented departments across the University of Bristol spanning biological sciences, engineering, physics, education, arts, sociology and law. They had only met a few weeks earlier, spending time figuring out how their disparate research might collectively tackle climate change issues and, now, they were standing together in front of a public audience – this is Research without Borders.

Research without Borders is an annual event run by the University of Bristol Doctoral College where doctoral students from across the university present their research to the public. This year, the event was run in collaboration with the Cabot Institute for the Environment and allowed doctoral researchers to explore environmental injustice and shape a cleaner, more resilient world.

Mrittika Bhattacharya (sociology) described the harrowing plight of Bangladeshi women who are displaced as an impact of environmental stressors. This unequal impact leaves them with the choices of either starving or migrating with associated risks and many of these women move to the neighbouring states of India.

In the absence of an international policy framework recognising the rights of these women, Mrittika’s research focused on efforts to build grassroots resilience and gender-transformative adaptation.

Climate change is often discussed together with the idea of global tipping points, and these were illustrated beautifully by Duncan O’Brien (biology), who described resilience as the ability of a system to both resist and recover from a change. His key message showed that there is potential for humans to influence the outcome of a changing world, if we know where to look.

Lingteng Kong (physics) highlighted the impact of the greenhouse effect and the potential key role of nuclear energy in reducing carbon emissions. His research explores the long-range detection of radioactive materials (alpha emitters) which can increase the efficiency of nuclear contamination detection and improve nuclear safety.

Tamsin Dobson (engineering) drew attention to marine engineering structures that suffer from metallic corrosion, which can be made worse by the attachment of marine life (such as barnacles and sea squirts). She is working to improve the opportunities for marine engineers to engage with marine scientists and her engineering research could improve the longevity of offshore renewable energy structures, helping us to move away from the use of fossil fuels.

Matias Gonzalez’s (arts) historical research into the conservation efforts of forest rangers in the Araucania Region in Chile demonstrates that the past can be a source for solutions.

He showed that foresters in the first half of the twentieth century could protect the forest for its ecological and economic importance, despite constraints, and that they could praise indigenous people for their ecological management of the araucaria (or monkey puzzle) tree. Therefore, Matías suggests that the historical human relationship with forests has not only been about deforestation, extractivism and environmental injustice but also about conservation.

This set the scene for Lin Zhang (law) to show how social enterprises are a modern example of how to bring different knowledges together in a common cause where this business form commits to a purpose beyond profits. She highlighted the recognition and the importance of social enterprise law as the instrument to enable and regulate social enterprises to be vehicles for change.

The presentations were wrapped up by Mark Neild (education), whose research into the facilitation of innovation shows that the most effective transformations are never designed top-down but emerge through multi-disciplinary teams working in co-production with their environments. He highlighted how to empower co-creativity among such teams towards a shared purpose of tackling climate change.

All of these presentations showed clear connections and brilliant ideas for collaborative projects emerged from the event. These included considering what data Duncan’s models would need to predict flooding in Bangladesh, improving and extending artificial reefs that could act as flood defences for Bangladeshi villages and developing a new social enterprise that could help tackle legal issues for climate change migrants, just to name a few.

So, as the hot evening drew in on Bristol’s busy streets, the audience made their way home, fired up with reasons to be hopeful and a belief that we can co-create a better future for the planet.

Tamsin Dobson is a post graduate engineering student at the University of Bristol 

This article is co-authored by: Mrittika Bhattacharya, Matias Gonzalez, Lingteng Kong, Mark Neild, Duncan O’Brien and Lin Zhang

Main photo: Betty Woolerton

Read more: IPCC report: ‘An alarming warning about the repercussions of failing to act’

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