ERC projects
The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) has been awarded eight European Research Council (ERC) grants in three years, since 2015. Each project (of between 1.5 and 2 million euros) lasts for five years and allows the recruitment of a team of six or seven doctoral students and postdocs.
These are the ERC projects active at ICTA-UAB.
Led by Oriol Marquet
"Starting Grant" (StG)
The project "The active travel backlash paradox: opposition and acceptability determinants of built environment-based sustainable travel interventions" will analyse the reasons why some of the ambitious public proposals aimed at reducing car use and creating more sustainable, equitable and healthy transport systems have been met with strong opposition.
At the same time, politicians around the world who have pushed for built environment-based travel demand policies have subsequently been vindicated by major re-election wins or better-than-expected election results. This would suggest the existence of an "active travel backlash paradox," one where loud opposition movements might be concealing substantial silent support towards measures that aim to transform the built environment to make it more walkable and cyclable.
The project will seek to validate the existence and better understanding of this paradox. To do so, it will use a multi-scale and multi-method design to be applied to eight transport-policy leading European cities. Using election data and geolocated data on land-use transformation, the project will be able to assess the associations between voting behaviour and built environment-based sustainable travel interventions. Combined with public opinion surveys and interviews with experts to understand the socio-economic, individual and contextual factors underlying acceptability/opposition towards these policies, they will be able to understand opposition causes, along with their spatial and social distribution. This will allow exploring much-needed future pathways towards efficient and widely accepted sustainable transport policies.
Led by Johannes Langemeyer
"Starting Grant" (StG)
The project "Fostering Internet-based Values of the Environment (BIG-5)", led by Johannes Langemeyer, will highlight the role of the Internet and social networks in building new ways of experiencing nature, a practice that is in decline.
There is a belief that this decline leads to a dwindling appreciation of nature and consequently less commitment to environmental stewardship. Langemeyer argues that the Internet becomes an enabler of experiences in nature, as well as creating natural values and fostering environmental stewardship.
The BIG-5 project will introduce Digital Relational Values (DRVs) as fundamental values in virtual communities, triggered by indirect experiences of nature. The project will trace these values across five landscape types, five large social media networks, and in five European languages through qualitative and quantitative (big data) approaches in an inductive-deductive manner.
Led by Isabelle Anguelovski
"Proof of Concept"
Identifying the processes that have led to green gentrification in existing green projects is key to achieving environmental and climate justice. Municipal planners should be equipped with this knowledge in order to take action before green gentrification takes place in a proactive and collaborative manner better support marginalized communities.
Rather than seeing environmental justice and climate vulnerable groups as “victims” of climate impacts and inequitable climate interventions, this project meets residents with lived “expertise” to empower them and their representative CBOs by incorporating their knowledge and perception of climate gentrification risks into adaptive capacity tools. The project will promote residents to co-design and test anti-displacement policy tools in a regional partnership of community, CBOs, and municipalities. This process will ensure the policy tool’s implementation over time, ultimately building a future practice of urban climate justice.
This approach will uncover local spatial knowledge and perceptions (e.g. through a participatory mapping approach), through which residents can share their own notions of risks, adaptation capacity and resources, and overall ecological street knowledge.
In Boston (2023-) and Barcelona (2024-) CLIMATEJUSTICEREADY aims to:
- Identify the extent to which resilient infrastructure might create greater vulnerability to future gentrification
- Incorporate risk (and resilience) perspectives from residents, outside the exclusive province of the expert researcher, valuing citizen science approaches and integrating vernacular knowledge
- Propose and test anti-climate gentrification tool, prioritizing residents’ voices and preferences
Led by Jeroen van den Bergh
"Advanced Grant" (AdG)
Do different opinions about the relationships between economic growth and the environment influence the social-political support for serious climate policy? The new project "Climate Policy versus Economic Growth: Views, Models and Innovative Strategies" (CLIMGROW) aims to find an answer to this question.
The project, led by ICTA-UAB economist Jeroen van den Bergh, has received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). The motivation for it is that while climate change has revived the debate on limits-to-growth, current research on support for climate policy neglects this debate and associated opinion dynamics.
The project will study to what extent concerns about economic growth, ranging from pro- to anti-growth, hamper social-political support for ambitious climate policy, and how this can be amended.
Using surveys, experiments and interviews, it will firstly assess whether beliefs about growth versus environment affect the opinions stakeholders (voters, advisers, NGOs, etc.) have about climate policy, and whether this is moderated by their preferences regarding specific policy instruments, such as standards or subsidies. The project further will test the role of information by comparing the communicative appeal of, and political judgement under, distinct beyond-GDP metrics. In addition, it will explore how growth concerns have affected the design of pledges in the Paris Agreement, given that these demarcate national climate policies.
Based on the data and insights collected, the second part of the project will undertake system dynamics and agent-based modelling to study co-dynamics of climate-policy design and support. The result will be a model of the "policy-support cycle", comprising policy design, economic and emissions impacts, opinion dynamics (support/resistance) and policy adaptation. To this end, growth strategies and climate policies will be compared under distinct beyond-GDP metrics, in turn translating into consequences for stakeholder opinion dynamics. This will allow assessing which dynamic policy paths can count on stable and sufficient support under diverse economic and climate scenarios.
Based on the results, the project will explore whether an “agrowth” strategy can increase support for ambitious climate policy. Agrowth reflects indifference about GDP patterns, motivated by GDP but not measuring genuine progress.
Given stakeholder diversity, interviews will be performed to formulate tailored strategies in this regard. Proposals similar to agrowth, notably under the label of “post-growth”, will be examined as well.
Led by Dan Brockington
"Advanced Grant" (AdG)
CONDJUST project works with conservation models and communities of practice to develop new theories and practices of socially just decolonised conservation.
Conservation Data Justice is an emerging research field that explores the data justice implications of data used in conservation decision-making, particularly in prioritization exercises. It is becoming increasingly important as the new ’30 by 30′ resolution from the recent Biodiversity CoP in Montreal takes effect. This calls for effective conservation action over 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030.
But where should that conservation attention be directed? What might happen to people, and biodiversity, under different conservation regimes? Answering these questions requires complex modelling work, which must involve many forms of data, all which are which are likely to be flawed in diverse ways.
CONDJUST (Conservation Data Justice) will interrogate conservation data and models and explore the epistemic communities producing them, to develop new theories of socially just, data-driven conservation. It will challenge the colonising tendencies of prioritisation work and seek decolonising alternatives.
CONDJUST is funded by the European Union (ERC, CONDJUST, 101054259). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Liderado por Umberto Lombardo
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
Despite decades of research, the relative importance of environmental vs cultural factors in determining prehistoric population growth is still one of archaeology’s greatest scientific challenges. Reaching an agreement about the drivers of demographic dynamics is very difficult because of the fragmentary, incomplete and biased nature of archaeological records. Umberto Lombardo’s project DEMODRIVERS is designed to overcome this problem.
This five-year interdisciplinary project will investigate the patterns and drivers of human demographic dynamics by focusing on a regional case study, the Llanos de Moxos in the Bolivian Amazon, that has a potentially unparalleled explanatory power. This region at the southwestern end of the Amazon hosts a recently discovered, almost complete archaeological record, made up of 4700 sites spanning 8300 years and distributed over 100,000 km2. This record is unique in the world, offering us the first opportunity to quantify how far demographic trends and patterns responded to exogenous (climate, landscape) and endogenous (culture, technology) variables. This research aims to exploit the full potential of the Llanos de Moxos archaeological record by taking an unconventional approach: the density of the occupation and its spatial and temporal boundaries will be measured by studying 150 stratigraphic cores extracted from 100 evenly distributed archaeological sites.
The project includes 3 periods of fieldwork in the Bolivian Amazon for a total of 9 months. The approach is interdisciplinary, integrating conventional archaeology with state-of-the-art geoarchaeology, biomarkers, palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology and artificial intelligence. The results of the project will provide a very thoroughly documented case study against which other models and reconstructions based on incomplete, fragmented and often biased datasets can be compared. The results of the project have broad implications across several disciplines.
Led by Álvaro Fernández- Llamazares
"Starting Grant" (StG)
The project "Assessing long-term changes in Indigenous Environmental Knowledge", led by Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, researcher at ICTA-UAB and the UAB Department of Animal Biology, Plant Biology and Ecology (BABVE), will analyse Indigenous Environmental Knowledge (IEK) systems to determine how they change over time and the ecological impacts associated with such changes.
Some studies suggest the existence of processes of erosion, adaptability and resilience of this knowledge Indigenous People have about the natural environment, but lack data on these possible changes over long periods of time and their knock-on effects on biodiversity. In partnership with the Tsimane' Indigenous Peoples of the Bolivian Amazon, Fernández-Llamazares will systematically collect the ethnobiological data needed to analyse how the loss of collective memory and knowledge impinges negatively on biodiversity conservation.
The project’s ground-breaking nature lies on its focus not only on changes in IEK content (e.g., plant uses), but also on the contexts for such changes (e.g., biocultural landscapes), and their interwoven ecological impacts (e.g., forest loss).
Liderado por Panagiota Kotsila
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
The IMBRACE project is a novel, comparative and in-depth study that will open new paths for research at the nexus of climate, health, and immigration.
Climate change, human health and immigration are arguably the most prominent, enduring, and challenging issues of our times, with important implications for justice. Studies on the nexus of these issues have largely focused on climate change as posing challenges to health and thus acting as a push-factor for migration. However, our understanding of how climate is impacting the health of immigrants in their places of destination is still poor.
Understanding potential climate and health inequities is further hampered by the fact that immigrant communities in Europe are far from homogenous, and are often racialized groups of great ethnic diversity.
Focusing on 6 case-study cities in Europe, IMBRACE aims to examine the factors that shapes immigrants’ climate health vulnerability and how their knowledge and practices can influence their own coping capacities and urban climate adaptation in general. The aim is to achieve more effective and just approaches. To this end, the project focuses on the two most relevant climate impacts for urban areas in Europe with important health implications: increased and prolonged heat, and intense rainfall and flooding. Researchers will use a pioneering feminist political ecology approach that combines participatory ethnography, critical discourse and policy analysis, and transdisciplinary knowledge production.
Liderado por Gara Villalba
"Proof of Concept Grant"
The NUTRISOIL project aims to address the impoverished state and quality of the urban and peri-urban agricultural land for the sustainable implementation of urban agriculture in cities.
Currently, many public policies promote urban and peri-urban agriculture with the aim of increasing food autonomy in cities, minimising food losses and reducing the environmental impact associated with transport, mineral fertiliser production and waste management.
Yet up to date, most cities in the European Union have low local crop production and farmers are faced with degraded soils due to intensified soil tillage with heavy machinery, and increased use of organic or chemical fertilisers often with a surplus of nitrogen and phosphorus.
Although crops generate vast volumes of nutrient-rich waste, recovery of these nutrients through composting and wastewater is not possible and remains anecdotal in urban agriculture. What prevents the circularity of nutrients for application in urban areas and what can be done to overcome these obstacles?
Through her project, Gara Villalba is committed to the circularity of resources within the city and proposes that urban waste such as pruning biomass residues from urban parks, forests and agriculture rich in organic carbon be used to improve the function of soil microbiota, counteract the accumulation of carbonates, favour drainage and, in general, improve soil quality and the efficiency of the nutrition cycle. To this end, she will carry out a set of experiments with combinations of pruning residues with recovered nutrients in which crop quality and quantity, environmental emissions and soil quality will be analysed.
Liderado por Giorgos Kallis, Jason Hickel & Julia Steinberger
"Synergy Grant"
We face multiple intertwined crises – from climate change to geopolitical insecurity – should we rethink our understanding of economy, and move away from growth dependency? The REAL project aims to offer new pathways for what the researchers call a “post growth” era, in which achieving universal human wellbeing is achieved within planetary boundaries – and removed from dependence on economic growth.
In this quest, the researchers focus on possibilities, policies, politics and provisioning – and then implementation in practice. More specifically, they will develop equitable North-South convergence scenarios, model human well-being achievement and articulate post-growth policy packages. Among the research aims are developing democratic models of provisioning systems to ensure future populations have adequate access to necessities such as energy, food, shelter, health and social security, and identifying political and practical steps towards post-growth deals.
REAL is based on the premise that post-growth transitions may unlock a far more ecologically stable and socially prosperous future than current trajectories. By moving post-growth research from economics to broader social sciences, the research combines resource/energy modelling, political economy and socio-political analysis.
Led by André Colonese
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
TRADITION is an ERC-Consolidator Grant funded research project that will assess the long-term development of small-scale fisheries in South America, and their legacy to present day food security and poverty alleviation.
Our interdisciplinary team, led by André Colonese, will investigate the historical ecology of subsistence fisheries along the Atlantic Forest coast of Brazil during major cultural and environmental events to test the hypothesis that fishing has played a role in supporting agricultural expansion in pre-Columbian times and during the historical colonization and urbanization of this region, and that this still echoes among present day artisanal fisheries.
The traditional knowledge of small-scale fisheries is seen as crucial in current debates and policies concerning sustainable fisheries and biodiversity, yet these fisheries and their actors are historically invisible in most tropical and subtropical regions. A thorough recognition of their socio‐economic and ecological importance requires an understanding of the scale of human interaction with marine environments and resources that transcends modern assessments and most historical records.
Led by Gara Villalba
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
Gara Villalba leds the ERC Consolidator Grant project “Integrated System Analysis of Urban Vegetation and Agriculture” (URBAG). Nowadays, many cities are implementing green infrastructures despite having little quantitative and comprehensive knowledge as to which infrastructure strategies are more effective in promoting food production, air quality and temperature while reducing environmental impact.
Gara Villalba's research aims to find out how urban green infrastructures can be most efficient in contributing to urban sustainability, in order to improve the way cities function, in support to their inhabitants’ quality of life and their environments. This will evaluate which combinations of urban, peri-urban agriculture and green spaces result in the best performance in terms of local and global environmental impact.
These are the ERC projects we have developed over the last few years and which have recently been completed.
Led by Eric Galbraith
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
The overarching goal of the BIGSEA Project is to develop new quantitative methods for including human activity as a directly-coupled component of Earth system models. The global ocean is an ideal testbed for this approach, given the relatively simple nature of human activity in the ocean, and rapid developments in simulating the marine ecosystem from ocean physics.
The BIGSEA Project is developing a unified, data-constrained, grid-based modeling framework to represent the most important interactions of the global human-ocean system. The work is exploring new ways to represent human activity, well-being, and societal behaviour within a physically-based structure.
By considering the human-ocean system from this vantage point, some key questions emerge. These include:
- How can human experience, quantified on an individual, per-hour basis, be related to fishing activity in a simple, data-constrained way?
- How do animals influence the sinking flux of organic particles, and what does this mean for oxygen minimum zones, nutrient recycling and nutrient stoichiometry?
- Has ocean biogeochemistry been altered by the restructuring of marine ecosystems caused by fishing?
Led by Joan Martínez-Alier
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
Environmentalism is about Justice. Our economic system produces social and environmental injustices. Too many people, animals and plants are contaminated, displaced and killed. This is often linked to companies that provide our materials, food, water and energy. Communities and people try to resist pressures from these economic forces. But economic forces try to enforce increasingly violent digging and dumping on increasingly vulnerable and populated places. Alternative practices and narratives to the unsustainable economy exist and show the way forward.
The ENVJUSTICE project maps environmental conflicts along the supply chain.
The Action Plan of ENVJUSTICE comprises several points:
- The expansion and updating of the EJAtlas database.
- The production of scientific papers based on analysis of the EJAtlas database.
- The expansion of the vocabulary of the degrowth and environmental justice movements.
- Activities to spread awareness and contribute to the global environmental justice movement.
Led by Jeroen van den Bergh
"Advanced Grant" (AdG)
“Behavioral-evolutionary analysis of climate policy: Bounded rationality, markets and social interactions” (EVOCLIM).
The project studies the design of climate policy within a behavioural-evolutionary framework. This offers three advantages:
(1) evaluate the effectiveness of very different climate policy instruments in a consistent and comparative way;
(2) study policy mixes by considering synergistic interaction between instruments from a behavioural as well as systemic perspective;
(3) assess policy impacts mediated by a combination of markets and social interactions.
The project makes use of questionnaire surveys (of citizens and experts), experimental surveys (consumers), and agent-based modelling (including social networks). The project culminates in improved advice on climate policy.
Led by Isabelle Anguelovski
"Starting Grant " (StG)
GREENLULUS (Green Locally Unwanted Land Uses) analyzes the conditions under which urban greening projects in distressed neighborhoods redistribute access of environmental amenities to historically marginalized groups. The study takes place in 40 cities in Europe, the United States, and Canada.
Our research assesses the extent to which urban greening projects such as parks, greenways or ecological corridors encourage and/or accelerate gentrification, given such projects have been recently shown to be factors contributing to residents’ exclusion and marginalization. Through an innovative FUG (Fair Urban Greening) index, we analyze which cities most equitably distribute the benefits of greening. We also provide new tools for municipal decision-makers to conduct an environmental equity performance analysis of new or restored green amenities. Lastly, our research included an in-depth analysis of cases of community mobilization and contestation, and of the policies and measures that municipalities develop to address exclusion in “greening” neighborhoods. Our hypothesis is that the social and racial inequities present in sustainability projects make green amenities Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) for poor residents and people of color.
Led by Victoria Reyes-García
"Consolidator Grant" (CoG)
LICCI – Local Indicators of Climate Change Impacts: the contribution of local knowledge to climate change research – is a European Research Council (ERC) funded project aiming to bring indigenous and local knowledge to climate change research.
Through cutting-edge science, we strive to deepen our understandings of perceived climate change impacts, and endeavor to bring indigenous and local knowledge into policy-making processes and influence international climate change negotiations. The LICCI team is dedicated to creating a wide network, which encompasses researchers, practitioners, and the general public who are interested in indigenous and local knowledge systems and climate change.
Led by Antoni Rosell-Melé
"Advanced Grant" (AdvGr)
Tropical climates are changing rapidly in the most populated regions of the planet. The changes largely arise from alterations in the Hadley circulation driven by natural and anthropogenic factors, whose relative roles and temporal variability are unclear. These knowledge gaps are in part due to the shortage of methods to study the atmospheric circulation before the advent of instrumental and satellites observations, and compounded by the contradictions between models and palaeo-data.
The aim of the project is to develop an innovative palaeo-proxy approach to investigate the natural range of variability of the Hadley circulation during past episodes of extreme warmth and cold. The approach relies on the exploitation as climate proxy of an untapped but widespread material in marine sediments: windborne pyrogenic carbon (PyC) derived from savannah and grassland fires in the tropics.
Through the geochemical and isotopic spatial characterization of PyC, along with the analysis of mineral dust in the modern tropical deep ocean, and a PyC biogeochemical model, we will build an interpretative framework of PyC deposition in deep-sea sediments. Its application in Pliocene-Pleistocene sequences from the Atlantic and the Pacific will allow the reconstruction of past meridional and zonal shifts in the Intertropical Convergence Zone and the Southern hemisphere westerlies, and provide new constraints on the natural variability of the Hadley circulation and associated hydroclimates.
PALADYN is possible thanks to the combination of cutting-edge geochemical and satellite data, and GIS methodologies, with in-depth interdisciplinary expertise on the palaeoclimatic study of marine sediments. Researchers will provide new important datasets of windborne deep-sea PyC for testing and refining prediction models of atmospheric circulation, carbon cycle, precipitation and wildfires, issues which are of paramount global importance from scientific as well as societal standpoints.