Dr. Roger Cremades

Profile

I am Associate Professor of Urban Environmental Change at the Sustainability Research Institute, School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds. I arrived in Leeds in 2024 after a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the University of Hamburg, postdoctoral and principal investigator roles in the Helmholtz Association at the Climate Service Center Germany, and an Assistant Professor position at Wageningen University. I work with concepts and methods of complex systems science on the (co-)development of simulation tools to explore sustainable urban futures and its interactions with environmental change within and outside the administrative city boundaries, including the role of plausible urban transformations and their water-energy-food-biodiversity nexus.

I have more than 20 years of experience working with cities on multiple capacities, from stakeholder and consultant to researcher. I coordinated research and co-production projects above £1M, and published about urban topics in top journal like PNAS, Ecological Economics, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Food. I am elected Executive Committee member of the Network for Computational Modeling in the Social and Ecological Sciences (CoMSES Net, 2024-2026), elected member of the Council of the Complex Systems Society (2019-2022, re-elected 2022-2025), and co-chaired the Development Team of the Finance and Economics Knowledge-Action Network of Future Earth (2020-2022). I am known for applying innovative complex systems methods. I like good coffee, good food, and multiple fermentation processes (e.g. kefir, circular sriracha, tie guan yin). A few times every winter, I either break the ice in a frozen lake and jump into the water, or do things of the sort on freezing torrents.

Responsibilities

• MSc Module leader.
• PhD supervisor.
• Liaison with Complex Systems Society.

Research interests

Towards a New Transdisciplinary Urban Synthesis, Building on Complexity, Global Change, Human Ecology, and un-Orthodox Economics.

Exploring how environmental changes interact with cities, inside and outside administrative boundaries, involves concepts and methods allowing insights across many, connected scales. Complex systems science provides a framework for integrating individual decisions into urban forms and cultures; for understanding how all these aspects of cities can be subject to multiple (e.g. climate) shocks; and for exploring how to respond to such shocks. In this context, human ecology frames cities as complex and dynamic social-ecological systems that create socio-economic opportunities and challenges locally and globally, acting both as magnets for sustainable behaviours, and as built boundaries for biodiversity. Finally, traditionally economic disciplines simplified cities to agglomeration effects, while somehow ignoring the meso-scale they represent in between micro and macro views.

Path dependency led by myopic decision making is currently dictating urban futures. How can we inform transformational pathways unlocking cities from past planning based on cars, and move towards caring spaces that promote sustainable lifestyles? How can space be liberated for growing food in re-designed parks, and for regenerating ecosystems and urban corridors for biodiversity? How can complex systems science help us to steer the co-evolution of all actors towards rapid sustainable transformations and social tipping points of consequence in the urban fabric? To research these topics, we need to incorporate insights from multiple disciplines, without falling within any particular mindset or theory, many of which are incapable of capturing the diversity of patterns occurring in a city at all times. 

New intellectual and methodological paradigms are needed to fully understand cities. The urban meso-scale focus is crucial in interdisciplinary research, because emergence in local and regional social-ecological systems involves multiple phenomena, often beyond individual disciplines, that relate to complex interactions. In the age of urbanization, the urban meso-scale and its feasible transformations require incorporating insights that only a complexity approach to social-ecological systems can provide. 

Qualifications

• Dr. rer. nat. (Hamburg University and Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, 2016).

Professional memberships

• Complex Systems Society (twice elected Council member)
• Network for Computational Modeling in the Social and Ecological Sciences (CoMSES Net, elected Executive Board member 2024-2026)

Student education

I teach and supervise topics related to the intersection of cities, global change, and quantitative complex systems science. From a complex systems science angle, I am quite critical with traditional urban planning paradigms, and invite the students to be develop their own views beyond existing disciplinary boundaries.

I try to relate teaching to my research interests as much as possible. In particular, these topics come across as repeatedly interesting for my students and audiences, also in terms of supervision for prospective studies:

• Social tipping points, evidence and quantitative simulations in agent-based models, see https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900577117 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12755076,
• integration of multiple data types in quantitative rationales for urban transformations, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.117407, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-525-2019 and https://iucm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/,
• resilience and adaptive cycles, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0044-2,
• combining complexity systems with behaviour research and psychology, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2024.102403,
• the role of cities in sustainable futures, within and outside their administrative boundaries, see https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00682-w,
• water-energy-land-food nexus interactions in and around the city and their implications for biodiversity, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.133662, and 
• cities and water scarcity, see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2021.107140 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4587632,

I am also developing new content, ideas and topics about:

• Adaptive pathways for cities,
• cascading impacts from climate tipping points and their effects on cities,
• sufficiency and urban policy, and
• the co-evolution of sustainable production and consumption.

I'm always looking for enthusiastic PhD students, If you are interested in my research please get in touch, currently I am supporting PhD proposals on these topics:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Environment and Liveability
• Business Models for Sustainable Development
• Environmental Justice
• Climate and Wellbeing
• Environmental Change, Psychology and Education
• Civil Society
• Development

Research groups and institutes

• Sustainability Research Institute
• water@leeds