ARU - Anglia Ruskin University

The Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) is a research institute at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU).

It was established by in 2011 as part of Anglia Ruskin University’s commitment to sustainability. It is a University-wide body which spans a broad portfolio of areas and interests related to sustainability. The GSI is now over 40 people (including staff, postdoctoral researchers, doctoral candidates, knowledge transfer partnership associates and visiting fellows). It has an annual research income of over £400,000, with research projects with the World Bank, UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, Lloyds of London, UK Institute of Actuaries, Cambridgeshire County Council and Skanska as well as UK Research Council and European funding.

The GSI brings together expertise in international climate finance and resource-risk-society modelling. The GSI has led the work of the UK Government on developing policy frameworks to enable public-private partnerships on international climate finance. The GSI has expertise in systems dynamic and agent based modelling techniques and has built the Global Resource Observatory (GRO) pilot models to understand the global risks associated with resource depletion and climate change at a country level. The GSI contributes its understanding of model development and assessment as well as stakeholder engagement in model building.

Members: 

Professor Aled Jones FRSA FHEA is the inaugural Director of the Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) at Anglia Ruskin University. Prof Jones’s research particularly focuses on the finance sector and government and how they will respond to the impacts of global resource trends and climate change. Prof Jones chaired a working group on climate finance within the Capital Markets Climate Initiative (CMCI) on behalf of Greg Barker, the Minister for Climate Change in the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and sits on the steering group for CMCI. Professor Jones will be supporting models cross-comparison and impacts in MEDEAS.

Dr Michael Green is a Senior Research Fellow and leads the Global Risk & Resilience research theme at the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. He is a natural-scientist, whose research expertise includes water resource management, climate change adaptation and decision-making under uncertainty. He undertakes applied research at the interface between water systems and decision-making by modelling environmental systems, performing socio-economic analysis and evaluating robust solutions and means to adapt to future uncertainty. Dr Michael Green will be supporting models cross-comparison and impacts in MEDEAS.

Dr Davide Natalini is a researcher at ARU in environmental security and in particular how scarcity or abundance of natural resources can drive conflict and the dynamics involved, focusing on food and fuel riots. The methodologies he uses are mainly quantitative and include statistics, econometrics and computer modelling. He is research assistant in MEDEAS and he contributes to the work for ARU on scenarios, models cross-comparison and impacts.

Dr Kat Buchmann is a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Sustainability Institute. She is a political scientist with expertise in climate and energy diplomacy, sustainable mobility, knowledge sharing and corporate influence on policy. For MEDEAS, her work includes research on climate adaptation, energy poverty and resource scarcity. She mainly uses qualitative methods, including interviews.

Mariya Trifonova is a PhD Candidate at Sofia University St. “Kliment Ohridski” (Bulgaria). Her PhD project focuses on the role of the institutional set-up for the development of the renewable energy sector in selected European countries. Mariya has more than seven years international professional experience in the energy economy domain contributing to several EU projects. As part of MEDEAS she conducted an ex-ante evaluation of the social effects and social barriers related to possible decarburization policies for Bulgaria including also a review of the effective decarburization policies in other countries with similar characteristics.