My name is Dr Leslie Mabon, and I am a Lecturer in Environmental Systems at the Open University. Before that I had a lecturing positions at the Scottish Association for Marine Science-University of the Highlands and Islands and Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, and prior to that did postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh.
The big question I’m interested in is: whose knowledge counts – and why – within governance and policy for environmental issues? I explore these issues through three sub-areas of research:
(a) risk, environmental infrastructure and the coastal and marine environment. I am especially interested in how environmental change may impact upon socially and culturally meaningful activities, and what the effects of this may be;
(b) climate change adaptation governance at the city or regional scale with a particular focus on equity and justice issues within urban greening strategies;
(c) ‘just transitions’ for high-emitting and carbon-intensive regions, where climate imperatives may have to be balanced with local concerns over employment and economic sustainability.
My research has been funded by the Japan Foundation, the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh among others. Outputs from my work to date on governance of environmental change under situations of high social and environmental complexity have been published in journals including Environmental Science and Policy, Global Environmental Change, and World Development. In 2018, I was selected to become a member of the Young Academy of Scotland, and from 2020 I have been a Future Earth Coasts Fellow.
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Dr Leslie Mabon 
Do your interests extend to the issue of opencast coal since it involves both energy and environmental change?
The latter because current planning policies in the UK do not recognise the environmental damage caused by burning the coal the existing planning systems allow to be exploited ( indeed in England, its flagged as a ‘mineral of national importance’ and this weighting outweighs other environmental considerations). This seems to be the situation in other jurisdictions.. In the USA attempts are being made to change planning permissions so that account is taken of the wider environmental damage caused by exploiting coal ( See ‘Senators urge Obama administration to include carbon costs in coal program’ (Reuters 2/11/15)
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/02/us-usa-coal-senate-idUSKCN0SR1A220151102#T1PD87wBvdGJ4GfQ.99)
I hope you find this line of inquiry of interest since opencast mining has resulted in an environmental crisis in Scotland as well. I can provide more information on this, but if you have a twitter account you can find out about it by following this hatchtag #ScottishMineRestorationCrisis.
Steve Leary for The Loose Anti Opencast Network
Thank you for your message. Yes, open cast coal mining is on the fringes of what I look at – it is not something I have looked at specifically so far (but I’m always looking for new things to do) but in both research and teaching something I am keen to stress is the deleterious effects of fossil fuels more widely. That is, as well as/apart from climate change from burning coal, there is also the issue that coal mining is an intrinsically dangerous and environmental destructive activity. I’ll check out the hashtag on Twitter and read up – would be good to discuss this further some time. Thanks again for dropping by the blog.
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