Primary Supervisor - Dr Christa Brunnschweiler
Secondary Supervisor - Dr Stefanie Nolte
Supervisory Team - Dr Tiziana Luisetti
Research background
This is a critical decade to restore and protect blue carbon ecosystems in the race to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Blue carbon ecosystems are found all along UK coasts, from saltmarshes to seagrass meadows. Their full significance has been recognised by science only recently (Macreadie et al. 2019), but already they feature heavily in UK policy initiatives such as the government’s £10 million Natural Environment Investment Readiness Plan (gov.uk 2021). Saltmarshes in particular capture carbon rapidly and store it for a long time (Beaumont et al. 2014) and offer valuable but poorly understood co-benefits to coastal communities.
This PhD project will provide a novel contribution to the research on blue carbon from the often-missing socio-economic point of view: from our understanding of how human behaviour could be influenced to support blue carbon ecosystems’ conservation and restoration to tackle climate change, to blue carbon financing. The PhD student will apply a combination of methods from natural and social sciences (see Brunnschweiler & Luisetti 2021) to produce evidence-based and replicable solutions for the realisation of blue carbon projects.
Aims & Objectives
- Assess data on ecosystem services (ES), including carbon stock and sequestration rate, for saltmarshes in eastern England using available data (e.g. Luisetti et al. 2011, 2019; Burden et al. 2019). Identify potential restoration sites through GIS analysis.
- Use survey and lab-in-the-field experiments to evaluate stakeholder attitudes and behaviour regarding saltmarsh conservation and restoration, including the transformation in land usage, risk preferences, and preferences for financing mechanism(s) to implement a potential ecosystem management scheme.
- Produce videos to examine how attitudes and behaviour could be changed to facilitate support for saltmarsh restoration and conservation.
- Use results of research to support UK policymakers and conservation organisations in restoring and protecting saltmarsh areas and enhancing the local economy.
Project timeline
Year 1 – Complete PhD training; undertake overview of existing data on saltmarsh ES and financing options for blue carbon projects; identify potential restoration/conservation site(s).
Year 2 – Overall experimental design; survey and experiment design for baseline survey; carry out and evaluate baseline pilot study.
Year 3 – Carry out and evaluate baseline survey in potential saltmarsh restoration area; design video information treatment and endline survey; carry out intervention and endline survey.
Year 4 – Analyse and write up results of intervention and endline survey. Complete thesis.
Excellence of the Research Experience
The student will co-author three articles, of which at least two will be submitted to economics or interdisciplinary journals. The student will benefit from the supervisors’ experience and links to the Coastal Partnership East and the National Trust, among others, which will be important in the site choice, design of the surveys and experiments, and dissemination of the main findings. The student will develop a range of transferable skills and knowledge such as academic writing, survey design and applying behavioural methods, analysis of quantitative and qualitative data including GIS-coded data, communicating with a non-academic audience. The student will have the opportunity to work independently and assume leadership in fieldwork.
For more information on the supervisor for this project, please visit the UEA website www.uea.ac.uk
The start date is 1 October 2022
Acceptable first degree 2:1 in Economics or related disciplines
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