Centre News

4CMR Visitors

In part through collaboration with the Centre for Science and Policy, 4CMR has hosted a steady stream of visitors from national, EU and other organisations wishing to learn about strategies to combat climate change. Recent visitors (or those who have hosted us) have included:

Robert Sorrell - Vice President for Public Partnerships, BP

Alice Raines - HM Treasury - Infrastructure Strategy Team, former Assistant Chief Scientific Adviser, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)

Stephanie Hurst - Head of Planning Resources and Environment Policy Division, Department for Communities and Local Government

Aphrodite Korou - Head of Standardisation Policy, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Liz Owen - Head of Customer Insight, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Graham Pendlebury - Director of Greener Transport & International, Department for Transport

Miles Elsden - Head of Defence and Security, Government Office for Science

Philip Langsdale - Chief Information Officer, BAA

Gary Kass - Principal Specialist, Evidence & Analysis Team, Natural England

Brendan Dick - Managing Director, BT Regions

Chris McFee - Head of Civil Contingencies Team, Government Office for Science

Patrick Allcorn, David Purdy and Tom Slater - Department of Energy and Climate Change, Community Energy and the Green Deal

Joel Rogers - YouGov, Director of YouGov-Cambridge

Greg Barker - Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change

Peter Quarmby - Environment Agency's South East Flood and Coastal Risk Manager

Miles Parker - Department of Environment, Food and Rurual Affairs, Director of Science

John Tesh - Deputy Director [Capabilities] in the Cabinet Office's Civil Contingencies Secretariat

Nicole Dewandre - European Commission, Advisor to the Director General -INFSO

Mark Swindells - Private Secretary to the Secretary of State, Department of Work and Pensions

Gordon McGregor - Energy and Environment Director, Scottish Power

Mitchell Harris - Policy Advisor to the Ministry of Defense, examining the impact of climate change on the defence mission

Charles Kennel - Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

John Parkinson - Head of UK Aviation Policy, Department for Transport

David Hart - Head of Economic Regulations, British Airways

Jan Muller - European Union Chief Scientific Advisor

Andrea Lee - Deputy Director, Strategic Analysis, Department for Communities and Local Government

Simon Gardner - Evidence Manager, Environment Agency

Richard Mellish - Head of Green Deal Support and Delivery, Department of Energy and Climate Change

Chris Pook - Deputy Director, Green Economy Team, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Pauline Reeves - Deputy Director, Sustainable Transport and Equalities, Department for Transport.

Tom Spencer - Institute for Environmental Security and former EU Member of Parliament.

Paul Chamberlain - Head of Analysis for Neighborhoods Groups, Department for Communities and Local Government.

Colin Church - Director, Climate, Waste and Atmosphere, Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.

Brian Field - Urban Planning and Development, European Investment Bank

Su Wei - Chief Climate Negotiator and Director General, NDRC, China

David Mair - Head of Unit, Science Advice to Policy, EC Joint Research Centre

Virginia Murray - Head of Extreme Events and Health Protection, Health Protection Agency

Chris Ganje - Policy Advisor, BP

Charles Abel Smith - Green Investment Bank

Elisabeth Sukovic - Deputy Director, Science in Government, GOS

Niall Mackenzie - DECC, Head of Energy Efficiency (Industry)

Howard Covington - Chair, Science Museum of London

Jasdeep Sandhu - Head of Chief Scientific Advisor Cabinet, DFID

Jeff Masters and Mark Simmonds - Office of Shadow Business Secretary

Akshay Kaul - Project Director, Infrastructure UK, HM Treasury

Terry A'Hearn - CEO and Deputy Secretary, Northern Ireland Department of Environment

Toru Yamashita - Director, NTT Data, Japan

Craig Davies - Senior Manager, Climate Change Adaptation, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development

June 2013

The International Centre for Climate Governance has ranked 4CMR as the fourth most influential and productive centre on climate policy research in the EU. Congratulations all round for the research team and students who have contributed to this success.

May 2013

4CMR is part of the winning bid for an EU-funded project on consumption-based carbon accounting, called CarbonCAP. The project is led by TNO in the Netherlands, starts later in 2013 and draws on 4CMR policy and modelling expertise.

April 2013

Jean-Francois Mercure has been promoted to Senior Research Associate. This is in recognition of his leadership role in developing and running the energy modelling group of 4CMR.

Soeren Lindner had a successful defense of his PhD dissertation on Disaggregating the Electricity Sector to Build a Hybrid Life Cycle Assessment Model. Congratulations!

March 2013

Aideen Foley, formerly a post-doc in the Department of Geography at Cambridge, has joined 4CMR as the climate science modelling lead in our Integrated Assessment work.

Mukesh Kumar of the Institute for Manufacturing at Cambridge has joined 4CMR as lead on a decarbonisation of the supply chain of the global industrial sector, carrying out the work in collaboration with colleagues at IfM.

Elisabete Silva is collaborating with 4CMR in the creation of a newly launched Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Spatial Analysis located within the 4CMR building. LISA is at the heart of new work on spatial analysis of climate policy, climate science and co-benefits research at 4CMR in partnership with Dr Silva.

January 2013

Scott Kelly has been elected a fellow of Darwin College. He will take up his fellowship in October.

The University has formed the interdisciplinary Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment, with senior academics and researchers from a dozen disciplines. The CFSE will produce assessments of the state of knowledge underpinning key issues of national importance, holding evidence sessions hearing the results of research from throughout the University. 4CMR is represented through Doug Crawford-Brown.

December 2012

4CMR has received a significant award from the Three Guineas Trust to further our work linking climate science, economics, energy and health models into an integrated assessment suite. The award will allow us to further bring together the science and policy communities around climate mitigation and adaptation.

4CMR completed a study on finance models for catchment-scale management of water systems, as part of a Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership Collaboratory on water management. These models are needed to bring coordinated investment actions by actors in watersheds, in large part due to stresses on these watersheds caused by climate change mitigation and adaptation aims. The bulk of the work was carried out by Jean-Baptiste Grosse of 4CMR (since taking a position in the EC).

November 2012

Jean-Francois Mercure was awarded a prestigious fellowship through the EPSRC to continue his research into develoopment of the FTT modelling suite.

October 2012

On the first of October, 4CMR and partners launched the 4.5M euro EU-funded TopDAd (Tool-supported Policy Development for Regional Adaptation) project. The project is developing tools to assess climate adaptation strategies for EU nations in regard to energy, transport and tourism. The consultancy VTT in Finland is the lead organisation, with 4CMR leading tool development on adaptation strategies and vulnerability reduction in regard to energy provision; performing a gap analysis for adaptation studies; and providing stakeholder engagement.

Working with Anglian Water and a variety of stakeholders, 4CMR has become part of the Sustainable Water project led through the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership. The project is developing financial models for catchment-scale management of water services, including management of landscape for carbon sequestration and reduction of climate risks. Jean-Baptiste Gosse has joined the 4CMR staff on temporary assignment to help with the work, which will culminate in a stakeholder workshop in London in December 2012.

July 2012

Jean-Francois Mercure's paper on "FTT:Power: A global model of the power sector with induced technological change and natural resource depletion" appeared in Energy Policy. It is the first of a series of papers reporting on his innovative work with colleagues concerning the rate of diffusion of low carbon technologies into the global power sector.

June 2012

4CMR's Soeren Lindner won the Leontief Memorial Prize, which goes to the best submitted paper for an upcoming conference in Bratislava. The paper, co-authored with Julien Legault (from the Engineering Department) and Dabo Guan (University of Leeds), is based on Soeren's original research on disaggregating the Input-Output characterisics of the power sector, which he has been applying to issues in China in collaboration with researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

4CMR has joined with YouGov-Cambridge in launching a national, EU and global polling project aimed at understanding the reasons behind attitudes of opinion-leaders and decision-makers on climate and energy actions, and the incentives needed to move national policies forward.

4CMR's Doug Crawford-Brown and Jean-Francois Mercure visited Doshisha University (Japan) as invited speakers at a symposium on Sustainable Urban Transport: The Automotive Technology. Dr Crawford-Brown spoke on his work on co-benefits and the carbon footprinting of transport infrastructure, and Dr Mercure spoke on his energy technology modelling and recent E3MG results by Annela Anger-Kraavi and Terry Barker on pathways to global decarbonisation. On the same trip, Dr Crawford-Brown spoke at National Taiwan University concerning co-benefits modelling as part of a 4CMR-NTU collaboration.

Meicy Hui, a member of 4CMR's Sustainability and Global Decarbonisation Research Group, led a workshop at the Rio+20 conference on E3 policy modelling, using a reduced scale model of climate science and policy of 4CMR. The workshop trained a new generation of decision-makers and citizens on the use of such models in identifying and assessing ways forward to climate change risk reduction.

Martijn Wilder, 4CMR Affiliate, received the Order of Australia, "For general service to environmental law, particularly in the area of climate change through contributions to the development of law, global regulation, public policy and the promotion of public debate, and to the community." The Order of Australia is the Australian equivalent of the OBE/CBE in the UK.

In a recent trip to China, Taiwan and Japan, Dr Crawford-Brown was elected Adjunct Professor of the Graduate Institute of Environmental Enginnering, National Taiwan University in Taiwan, and Visiting Fellow of ITEC, Doshisha University in Japan. The appointment at NTU is to allow continuation of the collaborative research on the co-benefits of climate policies, and the appointment at Doshisha is to assist the ITEC research centre with work on sustainable transport.

David Newbery, 4CMR Affiliate, has been awarded the CBE for outstanding services to the field of economics in the latest Queen's Birthday Honours. We extend our congratulations to him.

May 2012

4CMR's Programme for Forest Carbon Law and Policy (PFCLP) has received a grant to study the legal barriers to projects aimed at land use/land use change in countries of Africa and Southeast Asia, and to act as legal advisor to FFI for their pilot sites in Mozambique, Liberia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Dr Sophie Chapman, head of the PFCLP, is visiting projects in these nations to move the work forward throughout 2012. The work is being conducted in collaboration with NGO partners and the University of Cambridge Department of Social Anthropology, with funding through the Cambridge Conservation Initiative.

4CMR's Jean-Francois Mercure, Annela Anger and Pablo Salas visited IIASA near Vienna to discuss collaborations on E3 modelling, and present on their modelling of energy technologies within E3MG.

April 2012

4CMR held the launch event for the Cambridge Retrofit project, through funding from the Higher Education Innovation Fund to facilitate projects to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions throughout the city. Cambridge Retrofit is providing a template for similar actions at national scale in the UK to help the nation meet the obligations under the Climate Change Act. A question was put forward by Dr Julian Huppert, MP of Cambridge, before Parliament mentioning the need for the national government to support Cambridge Retrofit and related projects.

4CMR co-sponsored with the Centre for Sustainable Development an Energy Efficiency Finance Roundtable, bringing together finance leaders from the US, UK and EU to discuss programmes and instruments to deliver finance to energy efficiency improvements throughout the built environment. The event was conceived and organised by Jenny He, a member of the Sustainability and Global Decarbonisation Research Group.

March 2012

4CMR Director Doug Crawford-Brown was the featured lunch speaker in the D Group, with leaders of climate change and sustainability operations in energy, banking, engineering and investment firms. His talk framed a discussion around the current lack of coordination of climate, renewables, energy efficiency, etc policies and instruments in the UK, and considered a path forward to coordinating these through the Climate Change Act.

4CMR has become an Associate Member of the APPCCG. The APPCCG consists of almost 250 MPs, businesses, NGOs, academic institutions, and government agencies. It hosts regular discussions and seminars in the Houses of Parliament, providing 4CMR an effective avenue for getting research findings onto the table of climate policy discussions.

February 2012

4CMR joined the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and HRH Prince Charles in a workshop and dinner at Clarence House examining environmental externalities in the global economy. The event was led by CEOs and sustainability leaders in many of the largest global corporations, chaired by Ian Cheshire, Group Chief Executive of Kingfisher Plc.

December 2011

Jonno Evans, a student in the Sustainability and Global Decarbonisation Research Group, produced a quite interesting article for the Guardian on the challenge of water in the Nile during a time of political and environmental upheaval. View the article...

November 2011

4CMR Director Doug Crawford-Brown met with the coalition government at 10 Downing Street to discuss energy supply and demand projects in the UK, along with senior leadership of Boots, Kingfisher, RBS, Royal Academy, Lombard, Linklaters...in a meeting coordinated by 4CMR Advisory Board member Karen Wordsworth of KPMG. The primary topic of discussion was identifying significant national projects that might marshal the will to significant carbon reduction, and to identify barriers to their development.

October 2011

RICS and London Flood Risk

Doug Crawford-Brown joined Peter Quarmby (Environment Agency) in a presentation to members of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the Cambridge University Land Society. The 4CMR talk described the on-going ARCADIA project and strategies for reducing the vulnerability of the London economy to climate-related events.

The Zero Carbon Society Career Development Programme

At 4CMR, we are supporting the student-led Zero Carbon Society programme to bring career opportunities to the attention of University students so they can prepare for those careers. We are sponsoring two of these events each term, beginning with ones focused on Business and Law careers. Students interested in attending should contact the ZCS.

Launch of the CCfCS

The Cambridge Centre for Climate Science launched both its inaugural seminar series and website this month. The CCfCS brings together the science-based expertise in climate change from across the University and at the British Antarctic Survey, facilitating interdisciplinary study of the mathematical, physical, chemical and biological advances in understanding climate change. It provides a point of focus for collaborations with the social science and policy sides of the University organised through 4CMR's Cambridge Climate programme, as well as a resource for external groups.

September 2011

A retirement...but not a farewell

On 30th September Dr Terry Barker retired as Director (and founder) of 4CMR, with a well-attended reception in his honour at St Catherine's College. Dr Barker will still be working closely with 4CMR in the capacity of Senior Departmental Fellow. Professor Douglas Crawford-Brown has taken up the position as Director of 4CMR.