Irene Lorenzoni

I am interested in how individuals, groups and collectives perceive the challenges of global environmental change, how they engage and respond to them. As an environmental social scientist, my research focuses on the relationships between individual perceptions and understandings of environmental issues - specifically climate change - and behaviours. An important component to my work is understanding how and why such responses are enabled or hindered, with a focus on societal and political processes shaping climate futures. Therefore my work also encompasses governance of climate change at various societal and geographical levels, both in relation to mitigating climate change and adapting to its effects.

I pursue these strands drawing from a variety of social science disciplines in an interdisciplinary manner. My current research includes societal transformations and low carbon futures (see ESRC-funded CAST centre), deep decarbonisation (see ERC-funded 'DeepDCarb' - Deep Decarbonisation: the Democratic Challenge of Navigating Governance Traps’ project), communication and accessibility of climate data in visual form (including work in collaboration with the IPCC), coastal adaptation and resilience. I serves on the editorial board of the academic journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Climate Change. I am also member of the Science, Society and Sustainability (3S) Research Group at UEA and and of the Tyndall Centre.