Adaptations around mobilities, flows and migration
Sustainability impacts and policies relating to a place can only be fully understood in the context of the flows that occur between places – including flows of people, money, energy, water, soil, species, natural resources, produce, manufactured goods, waste and vehicles.
By identifying and analysing these flows from an industrial ecology perspective, researchers will gain a better understanding of the connections and dependencies between different places and types of place, in terms of their sustainability, and how places, activities and ecosystems adapt and change over time as a result of these flows.
The programme’s main objective will be to understand the implications of these dynamic flows.
This will provide new insights for the development policies and practices relating to these flows aimed at delivering more sustainable outcomes in ways including:
- Reducing flows in regions by developing more decentralised economies and promoting greater self-reliance in communities;
- More sustainable methods and patterns of moving goods and produce;
- Promoting more sustainable transport through technologies (such as biofuels, electric vehicles) and social innovations (such as car pooling);
- A more sustainable pattern of regional development in terms of economic flows between rural and urban places;
- Patterns of social mobility and migration which do not undermine policy development aimed at creating more sustainable regions and other places;
- Physical infrastructure designed to support sustainable flows of people, energy and materials;
- The economic, social and environmental implications for different types of place of the import and export of material resources and waste.
This theme will link together researchers with expertise in transport and travel behaviours, drawn mainly from the Schools of Business and Psychology, and BRASS; commercial transport and logistics from the Schools of Business, and City, and Regional Planning; physical flows of energy & materials from the Schools of Engineering, and Architecture; species from the School of Biosciences; regional economic flows from the Schools of City and Regional Planning, and Business; and social mobility from the Schools of Social Sciences and Business.