This year the University of Plymouth hosted the International Conference of Environmental Psychology (ICEP) from the 4th to the 6th of September 2019. Dr Sabine Pahl and Dr Mat White organised the ICEP Conference, hosting more than 350 scholars interested in the relationship between people and the environment. This connection was the core theme of the Conference which focused on ‘Protecting People and Planet Through Social and Behavioural Science’. The Sustainable Earth Institute has proudly sponsored the Conference and itRead more

Hello! My name is Sabine Pahl and I am Professor of Applied Social Psychology at the University of Plymouth. I’ve always been interested in environmental issues since being a teenager growing up in Germany. Acid rain and “Waldsterben” were the key issues and everyone seemed to be an environmentalist then. I wanted to understand the human dimension in these environmental challenges – how do lots of small human decisions and actions stack up to have these negative impacts, and howRead more

Back in June, Dr Nicola Langdon and Professor Alison Anderson were fortunate to attend the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) 15th biennial Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE 2019). This is the eminent conference on communication and environmental research, and it takes place every other year. This year the conference took place during the week of the 17th– 21st June 2019, at the incredibly impressive campus at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. The conference brought togetherRead more

I’ve been interested in the role of the media in communicating environmental issues since the 1980s when I did my PhD. A lot has changed since then! Those early interviews that I carried out with environmental reporters working on national daily newspapers and BBC and ITN broadcasters provided a fascinating glimpse into a world that was rapidly changing. Mrs Thatcher’s ‘green speech’ to the Royal Society in September 1988 had a profound effect on the media agenda, though it wasRead more

As a part of the research being done by the team here at the Sustainable Earth Institute about the Deep Geothermal project at United Downs, we think it is really important to share as much as we can what we are doing with anyone who is interested. With this in mind we are planning a series of short summaries that look at different aspects of our research, which we are calling ‘Hot Topics’! The second of these Hot Topics drawsRead more

I am Francesca Tirotto and I am from the wonderful island of Sardinia! I took my Master’s Degree in Psychology of Social and Work processes at the University of Cagliari (Italy). During my university experience, I developed a keen interest in the research topic of Environmental Psychology. This discipline focuses on the study of the relationship between people and their surroundings. In particular, my aim was to understand psychosocial processes underlying sustainable behaviours. As a PhD student on the geothermalRead more