Competence Centre

Vera Trappmann is Professor of Comparative Employment Relations at Leeds University Business School. A sociologist of work, Vera has studied and published widely on the transition from socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, the restructuring of large enterprises in Europe (often in the steel sector), and how this affects workers and workers' biographies with a particular focus on precarisation. This equips her perfectly for understanding the challenges that climate change mitigation and adaptation and hence the socio-ecological transformation poses for workers, and how it may affect workers' careers and lives. She works with mixed methods, with longstanding expertise in qualitative and biographical research. Within the Hans-Böckler-Foundation Competence Centre, Vera is looking forward to working with societal stakeholders, trade unions and policy-makers on research that is applicable and contributes to enabling a just and fair transition of decarbonisation.

Felix Schulz is an interdisciplinary researcher at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), drawing on labour economics, sociology of work and social psychology to understand individuals’ and labour institutions’ perceptions of climate change and just transition policies, and the drivers thereof. Prior to joining LUCSUS, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change (CERIC), the Digital Futures at Work (digit) Research Centre and the Hans-Böckler-Foundation funded Competence Centre on social-ecological transformations at the University of Leeds, where he remains as a Visiting Research Fellow.

Milena Büchs is Professor of Sustainable Welfare at the Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds, UK. Milena's research focuses on sustainable welfare, social-ecological policy and just transitions. Several of her publications also focus on distributional and justice implications of climate policies and measures that improve their distributional outcomes. Milena is currently Co-I of the Horizon Europe project "Towards a Sustainable Wellbeing Economy" (2023-2026), and Co-I of the Horizon Europe project “Models, Assessment & Policy for Sustainability” (2024-2028) in which she will focus on social-ecological policy. Milena has extensive experience working with large representative survey data. At the Competence Centre, she will contribute to designing and analysing a survey on worker attitudes to climate policies, with a focus on fairness implications and social-ecological policy.

Professor Suraje Dessai is a world-leading researcher of climate change adaptation at the University of Leeds where he focuses on the management of climate change uncertainties, perception of climate risks and the science-policy interface in climate change science, impacts, adaptation and services. He is Professor of Climate Change Adaptation at the School of Earth & Environment and Principal Fellow at the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures. He has published more than 125 scientific publications (h-index: 49) and was listed 120 in the Reuters list of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists. He is a member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change (since 2022), the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) – Climate Transdisciplinary Advisory Body and the UK Met Office Hadley Centre Science Review Group.

 

Susanne Lorenz is a lecturer in Climate Change Adaptation at the Sustainability Research Institute (University of Leeds) and has been working in the field of climate change adaptation, both in research and practice, for 15 years. Prior to joining the University, she has worked in the Local Government sector in the UK and in environmental consultancy on climate risk, resilience, and adaptation. She is an interdisciplinary researcher and particularly enjoys applied and practice-relevant research focusing on understanding and facilitating organisational progress on climate adaptation, exploring the demand for and use of climate information in adaptation decision-making and examining the impact of legislative and regulatory drivers on climate adaptation.