Session One

Two cows, 20 chickens and 50 kilograms of maize: celebrating research impact in style - Lindsay Stringer, Department of Environment and Geography

Leverhulme prize winner and passionate advocate of participatory research, Professor Stringer returns to rural Eswatini to see what has changed since her last visit as a doctoral student investigating the impact of land degradation on local communities. Having never shared her research findings with the people she engaged with, this was an opportunity, 14 years later, to make good the deficit and to follow through with updated research and a series of interviews with many of the original participants. In this talk she shares with us what happened when she asked the participants how they wanted to share the findings. The three-month long village preparation for the research ‘celebration’ day vividly reinforced her belief that this is a model other environmental researchers could adopt to ensure their findings gain maximum traction with those who it affects the most. It is also a glorious way to celebrate the positive impact research can have on people whose voices are often ignored or go unheard.

How researchers at York and NASA developed an algorithm that reveals the links between the global pandemic and the planet’s atmosphere - Mathew Evans, Department of Chemistry

One of the few positive impacts of Covid-19 has been the improvement of the air quality in our cities. Or has it? Answering that question, it turns out, is far from simple. How, for instance, do you eliminate the influence of the weather on air pollution? To answer that question, Professor Evans and his team at the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories joined forces with global modelling experts at NASA. Using machine learning techniques, along with NASA’s immense computing power, they collated data from almost 6,000 air quality monitoring sites in 46 countries around the world. What they found was a massive and almost immediate drop in air pollutants, as the first wave of lockdowns began to bite (60 per cent in the case of Wuhan). The modelling developed with NASA was then turned to examine the impact of coronavirus on climate change in a wider research collaboration with the University of Leeds. Here the results were very different. In his talk, Professor Evans outlines the positive policy measures the research flags up in this deeply gloomy period.

Unequal risk: how vulnerability to climate change is determined by social systems, not natural forces – Henrice Altink, Department of History

Focussing on the developing economies of the Caribbean Islands, modern history professor and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre, Henrice Altink, reveals the unequal exposure to environmental risk of people living in regions impacted by rising sea levels. Building on the research for her latest book, which maps the multiple and often covert forms of discrimination in Jamaica, Professor Altink takes the country’s capital, Kingston, as the starting point for a talk that adds a vital new dimension to our perception of climate change. By deploying a historical approach to a ‘man made’ global problem, she reveals how the poor are much more vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather events because of long-standing social, economic and political factors, including racial discrimination. Tackling these deep rooted, structural factors, not just in Jamaica, but in regions across the globe where climate change is destroying lives and livelihoods, is every bit as vital to meeting the challenge of global warming as the quest for science based solutions.

Food for thought: how the pandemic could be a turning point in the way we feed ourselves – Bob Doherty, York Management School

Professor Bob Doherty ­– and the interdisciplinary IKnowFood research team he leads – have spent the last four years unpacking the inner workings of the food system to reveal why it is making us and our planet sick. In this talk he shows just how close we have come to empty shelves, and why now is the perfect time to learn the lessons from the IKnowFood research. Recently appointed by government to form part of a six-strong team tasked with examining food chains and the environment, Professor Doherty and his team are playing a key in role in shaping UK food policy, working with industry to identify the impact our food production and consumption systems are having on people and the planet; and to sustainable food strategies that lead to a more ‘regenerative food system’. Without this shift, he warns, the UK food chain will remain vulnerable to sudden shocks such as the unknown trade implications of Brexit.

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