Adapting to a Changing Climate: How UCL is developing a new approach to the challenge of net zero

This interview appears in the latest edition of the UCL Policy Lab magazine. To find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events, sign up for their newsletter here. 

Climate change is real, human-made, with its impacts being felt from the Californian hills to the sprawling delta of the Nile basin. Institutions, including UCL, have built vast walls of evidence – silos of statistics and frameworks for understanding this warming planet. This evidence has been crucial in winning over the public, business, and government. Yet we’ve entered a new, far more contested battle to tackle climate change.

Today, it seems our task is to build a shared capacity to navigate the changes needed to halt climate change and the competing political demands.

Today, we require more than simply evidence and stats. What is needed is a melding of scientific, cultural and political understanding - a deep willingness to meet one another with respect, and to listen to the fears that may come with change.

Alongside new technologies, we’ll also require the old political bargaining tools, solidarity and compromises—a negotiation with progress and prosperity, with leaders willing to be open about this change.

Professor Lisa Vanhala is one such leader. As Pro Provost for Climate Change at UCL, Vanhala is helping forge these new approaches to the challenges of climate policy and research.

In her work, Vanhala brings together climate researchers, organisations, and networks to inform a new approach, one which not only seeks to the evidence but also to help navigate and recognise the challenges facing communities, whether they are supportive of net zero or otherwise. Vanhala believes it’s the job of institutions like UCL to navigate the difficulties and pinch points in our society and culture.

She provides us with an idea of what is possible in climate thinking. Creating news systems for thinking through how we tackle those challenges that entangle themselves across nature, economy and culture —the ‘messy draw’ of the climate challenge.

“What we’re trying to build is a community of practice across different themes and bring people together to think in a way which cross-over both challenges, knowledge and experience”.

Vanhala sees this as a vital role for universities, bridging different spaces to help foster innovation and understanding.

“We need to bring this interdisciplinary approach into practice, rather than shutting or shutting out communities or individuals, avoiding biases and trying to think radically differently about how we come together to solve problems” she says.

“Part of our role as an institution, specifically as a public one, is serving the public”.

For Vanhala, that means building new tools for tackling climate change, whether scientific, cultural, legal, or political.

This may not be considered radical and yet universities are busy places where the drive for research findings can sometimes leave the capacity to help forge coalitions for change wanting. For Vanhala, the two go hand in hand and present a new, more innovative approach to big social challenges.

Fundamentally this is about building long-term support for change.

Our own UCL Policy Lab polling with More in Common shows that the UK public remains committed to net zero’s objective and believes in its principles. This has also been the case for the consensus within parliament, where the UK has maintained broad political support across parties for the net zero agenda. And yet, with the rise of new parties, today's politics presents a moment of maximum danger the net zero consensus.

That’s why Vanhala and her team believe building coalitions and evidence in the fight for net zero is essential. This means going beyond simplifying, informing or arguing but actually goes to understanding places and communities, helping them navigate the challenges ahead.

“I think there is a big question: What is the university’s role in a warming world? What are our responsibilities? We have resources and power, so who can we support and place that power in service of is a key question”. Vanhala says.

One answer is working locally, lending UCL’s expertise and, perhaps more importantly, its convening power to develop local and regional approaches to net zero. This includes Islington, where Vanhala is working to support working families adapting to a hotter capital, a city where many ordinary people live without a garden or even a balcony.

These considerations, Vanhala believes, help build solidarity and allow us to navigate the changes required to meet the climate challenge.

Although her research has led her to work with leading researchers, scholars, and politicians - taking her to the UN and countless COPS- it’s her early experiences of nature that bring her passion to life. The daughter of Canadian and Finnish parents, the time spent in the Finnish wilderness with her father seeded a deep love for nature.

“Finland is the most forested country in Europe. I feel a deep sense of peace in the forest, and I feel that connection with my father who has passed on. It allowed me to see the effects of nature on wellbeing.” she reflects.

Picking up her phone, Vanhala flicks through her photos.

“I now take my son to the same places. He has the same bug. I guess I’ve passed it on. Seeing the joy it gives him, it’s beautiful”.

Vanhala shows me a picture of her son, his smiling face beaming across the screen, holding a wild mushroom. “Mushroom hunting,” she says. “It was his first big catch”.

It is perhaps easy to brush away our own experience for the nature we grew up with, however small or large - to see them as incidental to the ‘serious’ work of climate analysis and the politics of net zero. Yet, as Vanhala’s work shows, a deep understanding of how we experience and understand nature, in both small and big ways, gets to the very heart of how we approach our choices in politics and the economy.

For politicians and leaders, grappling with these connections is vital to sustaining support for the challenges to come.

Fundamentally, we want the people who shape climate policy and research to be grounded in the same sense of love and care for the places we call home. This is about tapping into our shared memories of place, be it a small patch of forest in suburban England or the vast expanse of the Finnish countryside.

One of her colleagues, Sam Balch, is working with communities in the East Midlands, home to the Trent Valley. Once called ‘megawatt valley’ - its easy connection to industrial heartlands made it the perfect location for Britain’s post-war power stations, which fired homes and industry across the nation. For those who grew up in the small towns and cities that litter the valley, these vast cooling towers marked our approach home from long trips away.

The towers are now all but gone, and a new economy is emerging. One that requires the kind of work undertaken by the partnerships fostered by Vanhala and Balch - bridging ideas with experience and local knowledge.

“We’ve worked with a range of private sector companies and local bodies to help map the energy transition. Identifying where demand will be required but also understanding how we can better link the benefits of clean energy to local communities.”

For the team, this approach is critical to securing sustained buy-in from communities that have often felt isolated or locked out of the policy design process.

And further underlines a new approach to both knowledge and partnership. Fundamentally, it’s about respect for those communities who are being asked to transform their local economy.

What is most striking about Vanhala and her team’s work is its willingness to be humble. A capacity to recognise the varied nature of our places requires us to be adaptive to how we approach climate action, but also a belief that we can bridge those divides byfinding shared stories and tools for change.

In our work at the UCL Policy Lab, we provide further support and voice to this approach. Bringing together the polling, political insights and convening to create space for answers which avoid stocking divisions. Unlocking new opportunities for approaching climate research, net zero and environmental advocacy.  At the same time we will require political and social tools to deal with the deep emotional and cultural shifts net zero changes might trigger.

In Vanhala and her team, we have a compassionate group of individuals who are here to help navigate those challenges.

This interview appears in the latest edition of the UCL Policy Lab magazine. To find out more about Policy Lab and get the latest news events, sign up for their newsletter here.