Vanesa Castán Broto
Climate Change and Cities
Current research projects
The project LO-ACT (Low Carbon Action in Ordinary Cities) investigates climate-related innovations within the daily lives of people living in rapidly urbanising areas. The project situates those innovation within changing political contexts about what constitute a just climate response.
The project is funded by the European Research Council from 2019 to 2024.


The project CESET (Community Energy and the Sustainable Transition in Ethiopia, Malawi and Mozambique) analyses the role that community energy will play in creating sustainable energy futures. The project delivers a feminist, intersectional lens to understand how community energy is deployed and with what consequences for the people in those communities.
The project is funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund from 2020 to 2024.
In addition to direct the projects above, I also play an important role as a Co-Investigator in the project KNOW (Knowledges in Action for Urban Equality) which examines different modalities of knowledge co-production to deliver urban equality in nine countries.
The project is funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund from 2018 to 2021.

Previous project work
Most of my current work emerges from the three projects above, but some outputs emerged from previous work or other collaborative projects. For example:
The project Urbanising in Place: Building the Food-Water-Energy Nexus from Below is a project from the Sustainable Urbanisation Global Initiative (SUGI) Food-Water-Energy Nexus, jointly established by the Belmont Forum and the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe. It focuses the potential of agroecological urbanism in four cities.
The project Sustainable Energy Access in Mozambique- Socio-political Factorst in Conflict-Ladden Urban Areas, was funded by the British Academy (2016-2018), via the Sustainable Development 2016 Programme. Its objective was to understand the political economy of energy in the country and how impacted on people's lives.
The project Mapping Urban Energy Landscapes, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (2013-2016), sought to develop spatial understandings of human relationships with energy.
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