News and Events

Understanding how the public perceive climate change is crucial to encouraging behaviour change, according to a team of climate change experts in ENV who have recently presented evidence to a government enquiry. The three ENV and Tyndall Centre researchers – Dr Lorraine Whitmarsh, Dr Irene Lorenzoni and Dr Sophie Nicholson-Cole – contributed findings from their research into public perceptions of climate change to a recent Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee (EFRA) inquiry...

ENV researcher Corinne Le Quéré was shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Award in the "Young Researcher of the Year" category for her discovery of the saturation of the Southern Ocean CO2 sink due to recent climate change. Award winners will be announced at a ceremony held in London on November 29th. Corinne Le Quéré and her collaborators showed that the Southern Ocean CO2 sink has been affected by recent climate change and is no longer keeping up with the atmospheric CO2...

Recent work by Tom Gray, from the School of Environmental Science, in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society and BirdLife International, has made a major contribution to preventing one of the worlds most charismatic bird species declining to extinction. Bengal Florican is a turkey-sized ground-dwelling member of the Bustard family and is restricted to seasonally flooded grasslands in Cambodia, India and Nepal. The species has declined rapidly as a result of hunting and...

The Earth and Life Systems Alliance (ELSA) is a major strategic collaboration between the John Innes Centre (JIC) and the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. ELSA is a unique multi-disciplinary Alliance integrating world-class expertise in biological, earth and social sciences to tackle the challenges posed by a changing climate. ELSA researchers are aiming to understand fundamental biological processes in plants and microbes, and...

Playing a board game could be the first step in introducing people to the idea of individual carbon allowances and using them to reduce their personal carbon dioxide emissions. A team of researchers in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia is working with environmental charity Global Action Plan to develop two new tools to boost carbon literacy – the skills and knowledge needed to understand and reduce our carbon footprints. Led by Prof Jacquie Burgess,...

With around 20 appointed authors involved as across the three working groups of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ENV represents the single greatest concentration of climate science anywhere in the world. Further, the contributions range from atmospheric physics to economics and social science, placing ENV at the forefront of interdisciplinary research on the challenge of climate change to the planet. The IPCC reports have been highly influential in influencing government...

The 2006 ENV Annual Report is now available. The Report describes some recent, exciting, research projects focusing on the theme of Climate Change. The report also contains an overview of our Teaching Programme, including postgraduate opportunities and reviews ENV outputs and achievements over the last year. Read the Annual Report .

The Contemporary European Studies Association has awarded its annual 2007 best book prize to Professor Andrew Jordan’s The Coordination of the European Union: Exploring the Capacities of Networked Governance, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2006. The prize is awarded to the book that "has made the most substantial and original contribution to knowledge in the area of European studies". The jury praised it for raising “big political science questions” and...

Atmospheric oxygen rose to significant levels in the Earth's atmosphere 2.4 billion years ago in the so-called Great Oxidation, probably the biggest chemical transition in Earth history. Yet oxygenic photosynthesis, the source of atmospheric oxygen, is thought to have evolved at least 300 million years earlier and the cause of this time lag has puzzled scientists Researchers in the School of Environmental Sciences may have solved this conundrum with a new conceptual model of oxygen...