Maria Sharmina has been seconded as a Senior Academic Advisor on the Net Zero Foresight project, aiming to inform the government’s net zero policies
16 February 2022
This Foresight project aims to support the resilience of government net zero policies by understanding how different social and behavioural changes will affect our path to net zero.
This will help inform the government’s long-term emission reduction strategy, enable stress-testing of policies and assumptions against plausible societal futures, and support more effective and resilient policy. The project will achieve this by providing the evidence and tools to help understand how behaviours could impact net zero. It will examine trend data on behaviours that drive energy demand and emissions, explore how they may change in the future, and then develop holistic socio-technical scenarios that consider potential impacts of changes in both society and technology. This will help explore critical inter-dependencies, trade-offs, and indirect effects of potential shifts in different pathways to net zero.
The secondment is based at the Government Office for Science and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, until July 2022, with a possibility of extension.