My PHD project focuses on understanding factors influencing individual sustainable consumption behaviour and how these factors could promote a sustainability transition.
Christian Reynolds is a Public Health Research Fellow at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, University of Aberdeen, and an adjunct Research Fellow at the Barbara Hardy Institute for Sustainable Environments and Technologies, University of South Australia. Christian’s research examines the economic and environmental impacts of food consumption; with focus upon food waste, sustainable diets, and the political power of food in international relations.
Christian has experience in economic input-output, material flow and environmental (Life Cycle Analysis) modelling and has published peer reviewed articles on these topics.
I am currently head of the Junior Research Group POLISES which uses agent-based models to study intended and unintended effects of global policy instruments on the social-ecological resilience of smallholders. In this project, we focus on the impact of policies targeting climate risk in two common property regimes of pastoralists in Africa (Morocco and Kenya/Ethiopia).
On a conceptual level, I work in an international team of modellers, psychologists and natural scientists on adequate representations of human behaviour in agent-based models. Furthermore, I am interested in how to describe models in an appropriate and standardised manner to increase their comprehensibility and comparison.
Agent-based simulation of social processes related to food and agricultural supply chains
My research is focused on the security of water, food, and energy resources as well as natural resources planning and managaement. A lot of my work involves the integration of physical and social science research.
Agent-based modelling of sustainable residential electricity consumer behaviour
Topics:
Behavioural aspects of environmental problems: Use of evolutionary approaches to investigate how people react to environmental policy.
Resource scarcity
Climate-economic Models: Understand how economic agents think and decide about climate change and climate protection
Sustainable Development
Methods:
Agent-Based-Modeling
Genetic algorithms
Evolutionary economics
Behavioural economics
Ecological economics
Complexity Theory