Katy Roelich

University of Leeds · Sustainability Research Institute

Adapting urban sanitation systems to changing climate conditions will require substantial investments. However, there is a gap in understanding the funding strategies for such adaptation measures, especially amid concerns that resilience measures might reinforce existing urban sanitation inequalities. Through cross-case document analysis and comple...

Non-menstruators play an important yet overlooked role in shaping menstrual health. They may be the family budget holders who purchase menstrual materials, receive health information outside the household, or preserve social stigmas. In response, World Vision, supported by UNICEF, implemented a programme to influence non-menstruators among the Rohi...

Circular business model innovation is an important driver for the implementation of circular economy across industries and has become one of the central research debates in recent years. However, while macro‐, meso‐, and organizational level factors influencing circular business model innovation have attracted vast research interest, less is known...

Introduction Menstrual health in humanitarian contexts is a neglected topic. Its taboo nature presents difficulties for participants in menstrual health projects in these particularly challenging settings. Namely, their experiences may be concealed or overlooked in projects that are typically outcome focused. Realist Evaluation is a useful method t...

Moving to a low carbon society requires pro-active decisions to transform social and physical systems and their supporting infrastructure. However, the inherent complexity of these systems leads to uncertainty in their responses to interventions, and their critical societal role means that stakes are high. Techniques for decision making under deep...

Rapid action is needed in the energy sector to respond to the climate emergency. Here we argue for the increased use of ‘realist’ approaches in sociotechnical energy studies to inform this action. Realist approaches ask not just ‘what works?’, but also ‘for whom, in what circumstances and why?’. They place emphasis on understanding the mechanisms b...

Meat consumption behaviours contribute significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions. Interventions to enable meat consumption reductions need to consider the psychological barriers preventing behavioural changes. Our aims were twofold; (1) to explore the psychological barriers to reducing meat consumption and how they can be overcome through a...

Deep uncertainties like environmental and socio-economic changes create challenges to decision making. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) methods are recognised approaches to navigate deep uncertainties and support robust and adaptable decisions. However, their ability to fully reflect the context in which these decisions are made has be...

Infrastructure is crucial to the functioning of society and the economy. Yet, to avoid precipitating environmental breakdown, it must undergo transformation. We argue that citizens who rely on infrastructure’s services should have a say in how transformation is managed. However, the complex nature of infrastructure means that public dialogue is dif...

New renewable energy infrastructure is essential to deliver net zero policies in response to climate change, but a lack of community acceptance is a potential barrier. It is therefore important to understand what shapes community acceptance and identify policy responses. This paper presents a case study of community acceptance of a large-scale sola...

This paper explores the relationships between the moral philosophical foundations and strategic goals of two conceptions of energy justice: the “triumvirate conception” and the “principled approach”. We explore the extent to which the goals of these approaches align with their core aims and strategies. Having initially been developed to capture and...

In order to mitigate the well-being impacts of climate change effectively, we must reduce our use of fossil fuels. However, many contemporary forms of well-being attainment still depend heavily on the use of fossil fuel derived energy. Therefore, certain necessary forms of climate change mitigation are likely to conflict with current means of well-...

Climate change mitigation has two main characteristics that interact to make it an extremely demanding challenge of governance: the complexity of the socio-technical systems that must be transformed to avoid climate change and the presence of profound uncertainties. A number of tools and approaches exist, which aim to help manage these challenges a...

Up to $61 trillion of power systems investment is needed to fulfil the Paris Agreement. The mobilisation of so much capital is a huge challenge. As such, energy policy is changing to meet the needs of commercial finance. However, very little has been done to question the justice implications of this capital mobilisation, and what alternatives there...

Municipalities in the UK are increasingly engaging in local management of one or more parts of the energy system. The municipal energy companies set up to manage this engagement have the potential to contribute to a low-carbon transition through acceleration of low-carbon energy technology roll-out and demand management. However, municipal energy c...

While natural and manufactured resources provide the raw materials with which civil engineers work, the term ‘resources’ should always be considered in its wider interpretation and then in the context that resources are in many cases limited. That they should be used wisely (resource efficiency) is beyond contention – we do this as a matter of cour...

Existing international emissions reduction policies are not sufficient to meet the internationally agreed objective of limiting average global temperature rise to ‘well below’ two degrees, resulting in an emissions gap. Materials – such as aluminium, cement, paper, plastics and steel – act as a carrier of industrial energy that allows, through trad...

The transition to low carbon energy and transport systems requires an unprecedented roll-out of new infrastructure technologies, containing significant quantities of critical raw materials. Many of these technologies are based on general purpose technologies, such as permanent magnets and electric motors, that are common across different infrastruc...

The potential contribution of local energy infrastructure – such as heat networks – to the transition to a low carbon economy is increasingly recognised in international, national and municipal policy. Creating the policy environment to foster the scaling up of local energy infrastructure is, however, still challenging; despite national policy acti...

Reliable provision of water, energy and transportation, all supplied through infrastructure, is necessary for the most basic human and economic development to occur. Such development however, is not enabled by specific end-use products (e.g. litres of water, kWh of electricity, litres of diesel and petrol), or by infrastructure itself (i.e. the sys...

This research investigates the new opportunities that business model innovations are creating in electricity supply markets at the sub-national scale. These local supply business models can offer significant benefits to the electricity system, but also generate economic, social, and environmental values that are not well accounted for in current po...

The bulk materials mix in cities will not change significantly. However, increased use of ‘trace’ materials crucial for low-carbon technologies will expose cities to critical materials supply issues. Much of these materials will never physically cross city boundaries and thus cities must be considered as nodes in a wider infrastructure network. The...

Investment in infrastructure is recognised as a key enabler of economic prosperity, but it is also important for addressing social and environmental challenges, including climate change mitigation and addressing fuel poverty. The UK Government Strategy Investing in Britain’s Future argues that significant investment in “resilient, cost effective an...

This report investigates how new, system-wide value opportunities have arisen in the energy system and how local electricity1 business models can capture them. The research team was composed of Dr Stephen Hall and Dr Katy Roelich of the Schools of Environment and Civil Engineering at the University of Leeds. This report develops a detailed evidence...

Existing approaches to delivering infrastructure are repeatedly criticised for returning poor value for money to the taxpayer and being too narrow to capture the wide range of benefits infrastructure provides to the economy, society and environment. Austerity provides a further stimulus to innovate new ways of delivering, funding, valuing and manag...

Infrastructure is a means to an end: it is built, maintained and expanded in order to enable the functioning of society. Present infrastructure operation is characterised by: governance based on unmanaged growing demand, which is both inefficient and ultimately unsustainable; lack of integration of the end-users, in terms of the variety of their wa...

Municipal energy companies have the potential to contribute to low-carbon transition but could also deliver a wider range of benefits, such as fuel poverty reduction and economic growth. There are myriad ways that municipalities could engage in energy provision, however, local authorities face challenges related to matching their motivations to app...

Infrastructure provision business models that promise resource efficiencies and additional benefits, such as job creation, community cohesion and crime reduction exist at sub-national scales. These local business models, however, exist only as isolated cases of good practice and their expansion and wider adoption has been limited in the context of...

Renewable energy technologies, necessary for low-carbon infrastructure networks, are being adopted to help reduce fossil fuel dependence and meet carbon mitigation targets. The evolution of these technologies has progressed based on the enhancement of technology-specific performance criteria, without explicitly considering the wider system (global)...

The supply risk and exposure to supply shortage is becoming an important factor in the consideration of a mass low carbon technology roll-out. This study takes current criticality studies, which analyse the criticality of single raw materials, and extends it to calculate the relative criticality of multiple material transparent conductive electrode...

Decarbonisation of existing infrastructure systems requires a dynamic roll-out of technology at an unprecedented scale. The potential disruption in supply of critical materials could endanger such a tran-sition to low-carbon infrastructure and, by extension, compromise energy security more broadly because low carbon technologies are reliant on thes...

The transition to low carbon infrastructure systems required to meet climate change mitigation targets will involve an unprecedented roll-out of technologies reliant upon materials not previously widespread in infrastructure. Many of these materials (including lithium and rare earth metals) are at risk of supply disruption. To ensure the future sus...

Environmentally extended multi-regional input-output (EE-MRIO) models provide us with a wealth of data relating to consumption-based environmental impacts at a national level. The results can identify the categories of consumption and sectors of production that contribute most to environmental impact allowing policy makers to prioritise interventio...

Introducing new technologies into infrastructure (wind turbines, electric vehicles, low-carbon materials and so on) often demands materials that are 'critical'; their supply is likely to be disrupted owing to limited reserves, geopolitical instability, environmental issues and/or increasing demand. Non-critical materials may become critical if intr...

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Infrastructure operation can be described as separate utility systems provisioning unconstrained demand, with higher throughput corresponding to higher profits. In contrast, an efficiency perspective would prioritize coordinated infrastructure operation focused on essential service delivery at the lowest possible resource use. We investigate how to...

Infrastructure operation in the UK can be described as separate utility systems provisioning unconstrained demand, with higher throughput corresponding to higher profits. A more sustainable approach would prioritise coordinated infrastructure operation focused on essential service delivery at the lowest possible resource use. However, the presiding...

We present an assessment method to analyze whether the disruption in supply of a group of materials endangers the transition to low-carbon infrastructure. We define criticality as the combination of the potential for supply disruption and the exposure of the system of interest to that disruption. Low-carbon energy depends on multiple technologies c...

Sustainable and resilient urban systems require efficient and reliable infrastructure for supplying urban demands. However, resource-efficient infrastructure operation is rarely considered explicitly in urban sustainability and resilient studies. Our research investigates the transition of urban infrastructure operation away from supply of unmanage...