Research Interests

My research interests centre on policy change and technology innovation in response to climate change, intersecting existing bodies of work on environmental policy and science and technology studies. I have been a researcher and teacher on the human dimensions of climate change mitigation for over ten years. I have previously worked at the University of Technology, Sydney, in UK Parliament on an ESRC Fellowship, and at Durham and Oxford Universities.

Under the broad banner of climate change research, the two main topics of research I have expertise in are:

• Carbon markets and carbon accounting
• Low energy housing

Carbon markets and carbon accounting

I currently hold a Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellowship (ending Spring 2013) to work on carbon markets. The project, called 'Fungible Carbon' is in collaboration with Professor Donald MacKenzie at the University of Edinburgh. The project examines the tensions in creating a single fungible (i.e. standardised and interchangeable) international unit of carbon. A crucial way climate change is being tackled is through the construction of markets in which standard units of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are created and exchanged. Small differences in the rules and practices of these markets can alter substantially their environmental and economic impact, so understanding their effectiveness is of high social importance. This interdisciplinary research, drawing on ideas from economic sociology, political science and science and technology studies, is investigating how carbon is being made fungible, assessing the influence of this process on slowing increases in GHG levels in the atmosphere.

During the first stage of my Nuffield Fellowship I investigated how financial accountants understand and manage carbon credits. Financial accounting is an important but rather overlooked ‘bedrock’ of carbon markets. There is currently no international accounting guidance on how to treat carbon credits in financial accounts, and for this reason a diversity of practices have emerged. I sought to understand how international accounting standard setters are responding to the issue of climate change, and explored how they are trying to reach agreement on new carbon financial accounting standards and guidance.

The research methodology has involved an extensive policy/grey literature review of accounting guidance (from the main accounting standard setters – the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)) complemented by interviews (#25) with accountants actively engaged in carbon financial accounting: at large corporations in the European Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), at the IASB and FASB, and at accountancy/auditing firms.

I am an active member of the Technical Working Group of the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), see http://www.cdsb.net/.

Measuring Forest Carbon

The second, current stage of my Nuffield Fellowship research is on forest carbon. Here I am continuing my interest in climate change classification and standardisation but in a totally different field: forests rather than accounting. I am looking at how a global network of forest carbon measurement is now beginning to emerge, exploring how forest carbon measurement techniques and practices are being applied from a variety of disciplines (ecology, climatology etc) in response to the problem of climate change. There are pressing demands from policy makers for high quality global data on forest carbon in order to successfully incorporate forests into carbon markets. How are existing scientific practices and techniques being adapted to measure forest carbon on a global scale? What are the obstacles to developing reliable global forest carbon data, and how are they being resolved? How (if at all) is new forest carbon data and information affecting the operation of carbon markets?

These questions are being researched through tracking the work of a select group of expert forest carbon research scientists, at the moment concentrating on remote sensing. Taking a science and technology studies approach, inspired by the work of Bruno Latour and others, I am interviewing and work shadowing scientists to find out more about what issues are key to their research at the climate science-policy interface. I have just finished (December 2011) a survey of authors of the GOFC-GOLD Sourcebook - a handbook of forest carbon measurement methodologies, finding out how the authors got involved in GOFC-GOLD and collecting their views on the accuracy of measuring forest carbon. 

Low Energy Housing