Three projects granted CET Accelerator seed funding

Decarbonising healthcare

Anand Bhopal, PhD Fellow, UiB, Dept. of global public health and primary care. 

The project will develop a national strategy for decarbonising Norwegian health care while maintaining and improving health outcomes. Despite healthcare emissions being substantial, health has mostly been sidelined from broader climate discourse. Effective climate action within the health sector could have a multiplying effect on reducing carbon emissions while sending a powerful message to wider society.

1. To build a coalition of researchers, clinicians and policymakers using interdisciplinary experience and expertise to create a strategy for decarbonising Norwegian healthcare while maintaining and improving health outcomes.
2. To establish a national net zero healthcare hub which coordinates work with major partners including the University of Bergen, Norwegian Institute of Public Health and clinical leadership.

Climate Risk and Democratic Energy Policies

Esmeralda Colombo, Assistant professor, UiB, Faculty of Law.

This project aims to communicate to the larger public on the role of science for depolarizing and democratizing energy policies. 

How can scientists and policymakers better use climate science as a mediating tool for depolarization? How can judges fully consider experts’ evaluation in court, allowing for the epistemic justice of expert knowledge in climate change litigation? How can private actors respond to growing calls for science-based climate standards and their duty to deflect climate risk, notably in energy investments? The proposed project will attempt to answer all three questions through an interdisciplinary collaboration with practitioners, scientists, and academics, organized in three parts(infra2). The interlocking perspective is offered by the principle of epistemic subsidiarity, a constitutional principle that balances the relations between science and politics on different levels

Norwegian Energy POVerty (NO - EPOV)

Siddharth Sareen, Researcher, UiB, Dept. of Geography/CET

NO-EPOV will study the intersection of domestic energy poverty and transport energy poverty, referred to as double energy vulnerability (DEV) (Robinson and Mattioli 2020) in the context of Norwegian cities. The topic has come to the fore internationally as under-researched yet key to enable equitable energy transitions. The project is explicitly cross-sectoral and will attend to the incidence of DEV in relation to urban housing, mobility and low-carbon energy transition policies. Norwegian cities are leading transitions in urban energy that make them ideal contexts for this research to generate actionable and transferable insights. The project will apply a co-creation methodology and pave the way for an ERC Starting Grant application in late 2022.