Profile: Professor Jim Skea CBE

Profile of Jim Skea, Professor in Imperial's Centre for Environmental Policy, who has an active and wide-ranging role in climate change policy.

In the UK, Professor Skea is a member of the Committee on Climate Change, the body that recommends carbon budgets far into the future to the UK government.

He notes that the new administration has taken its latest recommendations on board.The country’s target for 2020 – a 34 per cent cut in emissions compared to 1990 – will be met comfortably, he says admittedly in part because of the slow growth of the UK economy.

The target for 2030 will be for a 57 per cent reduction.

On the global stage, Professor Skea is co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working group on climate change mitigation and the reduction of emissions.

The working group operates in an innovative way, with a Technical Support Unit split between the UK (based at Imperial) and India.

Professor Skea says: "We are looking at established ways of reducing carbon emissions, such as renewables, efficiency and nuclear power. But we also realise increasingly that agriculture and other forms of land use are big sources of carbon and other greenhouse gases.

"We plan to report by 2019 on ways of reducing these emissions as well as limiting the impacts of climate change on land use."

The piece first appeared as a feature in the annual Grantham Institute Outlook 2016-17.

The Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment, is one of Imperial’s global challenge institutes, which aims to shape the College’s priorities in this area: to inform government, business and industry, and civil society; to create and appraise expert knowledge; to train the next generation of leaders; and to support innovation.