Climate & Environment
At ITS Leeds, our Climate and Environment theme probes the rich, evolving interface between transport systems and the natural world. We explore how mobility shapes, and is shaped by, climate, air quality, ecosystems, and resilience. Our strategy is inherently interdisciplinary and uses a mixed methods approach. Drawing on rigorous analysis, co-designed trials, spatial modelling, and policy engagement, our goal is to help steer transport into a more sustainable trajectory.
Our Methods and Approach
We adopt an interdisciplinary toolkit:
- Co-design, living labs and experimental trials
- Spatial and systems modelling
- Behavioural experiments, surveys and choice modelling
- Impact exposure assessments and distributional analyses
- Policy engagement, governance studies, and institutional design
By combining qualitative and quantitative insights and always iterating between theory and practice we aim for research that is scientifically robust and operationally relevant.
Pillars of Inquiry and Impact
- Mitigation and Decarbonisation: working to reduce greenhouse gas and pollutant emissions across all transport modes by advancing low-carbon and zero-emission technologies, integrating transport energy with smart grids, creating new mobility services (shared, on-demand, micro-mobility), and incorporating behavioural and institutional change to understand how people, organisations and policies shift over time.
- Climate Adaptation and Resilience: preparing infrastructure and services to withstand climate impact by examining how roads, transit systems, digital controls, and traffic operations respond to extreme weather events (flooding, heat stress, storms), ensuring mobility becomes not only greener but also resilient under stress and uncertainty.
- Exposure, Impacts and Equity: quantifying exposure to air pollutants, noise, habitat disruption, land-use change, and ecological fragmentation, and analysing the distributional impacts on vulnerable populations who are most exposed and least able to adapt.
- Systems and Policy Integration: investigating governance, economics and institutional structures needed to align transport strategies with climate objectives, SDG goals, and local development plans, including the roles of incentives, regulation, finance, cross-sectoral coordination, spatial planning and integrated modelling.
Current Research Projects
CARS – Connecting Administrative vehicle data for Research on Sustainable Transport
TransiT (Twinning for Decarbonising Transport)
News
Contact us
Email: k.j.butterworth@leeds.ac.uk