Current Post: Lecturer

Room Number: Zicer 0.02

Telephone: 01603 593173 (+44 1603 593173)

Fax: 01603 593739 (+44 1603 593739)

Email: i.lorenzoni@uea.ac.uk

Publications: EPrints Digital Repository

Posts of Special Responsibility:

• Disability Officer
• Placement Director, Year in Europe

Research Interests

Individual and institutional responses to energy issues and climate change; the role and methods of public participation in decision-making and engagement; sustainability; environmental policy and politics.


Biography

My research interests focus on understandings of, and engagement with, climate change and energy. Through an interdisciplinary approach, I am particularly interested in the relationship between individual perceptions and understandings of environmental issues - specifically climate change, its causes and consequences over different timescales- and behaviours.

Critical to this work is an appreciation and understanding of the societal context in which individuals operate, hence my focus also on the communication of climate change and policy, and engagement. I have explored some of these issues recently in work on perceived barriers to engagement with climate change and their influence on individual and institutional responses (both in terms of mitigation and adaptation); carbon capability; public attitudes towards current energy use and future energy options, especially in relation to sustainability; the construction of climate and energy discourses in the UK.

Achieving a degree in Environmental Sciences at UEA signalled for me the start of my professional career in an area I had been keenly interested in since my childhood. Having undertaken an MSc in European Environmental Policy and Regulation at Lancaster University, I joined the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA again, pursuing research stemming from a strong drive to understand how people think about environmental issues and timescales, and how these relate to their choices, preferences and actions in daily life. Based in the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), some of my work focused on exploring conceptualisations of the future through socio-economic and climate scenarios with UK stakeholders. Having developed a curiosity in individual perceptions of, and responses to, global climate change I pursued this through a cross-cultural PhD, subsequently joining the Centre for Environmental Risk (CER) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. In August 2006 I took up the position of lecturer the School where I teach modules on environmental politics, environment and society, interdisciplinary social sciences.

I have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, recently co-editing “Adaptation to Climate Change” (with Neil Adger and Karen O’Brien, 2009, CUP) and “Engaging the public with climate change: communication and behaviour change” (with Lorraine Whitmarsh and Saffron O’Neill, 2010, Earthscan). I am also a contributing author of the IPCC's Third and Fourth Assessment Reports; member of editorial board of the Wiley Interdisciplinary Review (WIREs): Climate Change.


Significant Publications

• Turnpenny, J., Jones, M. and Lorenzoni, I. (2011) Where Now for Post-Normal Science? A Critical Review of its Development, Definitions, and Uses. ST&HV, 36(3) [May 2011] pp. 287-306. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0162243910385789
• Rogers-Hayden, T., Hatton, F., Lorenzoni, I. (2011) Energy Security' and 'Climate Change': Constructing UK Energy Discursive Realities, Global Environmental Change, 21(1): 134-142. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.09.003
• Wolf, J., Adger, W.N., Lorenzoni, I., Abrahamson, V. and Raine, R. (2010) Social capital, individual responses to heat waves and climate change adaptation: an empirical study of two UK cities, Global Environmental Change, 20: 44-52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.09.004
• Lorenzoni, I. and Hulme, M. (2009) Believing is seeing: laypeople's views of future socio-economic and climate change in England and in Italy, Public Understanding of Science, 18: 383-400. doi: 10.1177/0963662508089540
• Adger, W.N., Dessai, S., Goulden, M., Hulme, M., Lorenzoni, I., Nelson, D., Naess, L-O., Wolf, J. and Wreford, A. (2009) Are there social limits to adaptation to climate change? Climatic Change 93: 335–354; DOI 10.1007/s10584-008-9520-z
• Bickerstaff, K., Lorenzoni, I., Pidgeon, N.F., Poortinga, W., Simmons, P. (2008) Reframing nuclear power in the UK energy debate: Nuclear power, climate change mitigation and radioactive waste. Public Understanding of Science 17: 145-168. DOI: 10.1177/0963662506066719

Page last updated 2 November 2011