From Bloomsbury to Breakthroughs: UCL’s Climate Crisis Journey

Written by Professor Lisa Vanhala and Professor Mark Maslin, Pro-Vice-Provosts of the UCL Grand Challenges Theme of Climate Crisis.

As climate academics, much of our precious research time is focused outside UCL — whether poring over the politics, governance, and power dynamics of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process, or studying how earth systems may react to climatic tipping points. In our roles as Pro-Vice-Provosts for UCL’s Grand Challenge of Climate Crisis, we now have the opportunity to turn the microscope on ourselves as an institution.

UCL is a large and heterogeneous organisation with 67,000 diverse students and staff. Our estate ranges from 200-year-old Georgian townhouses in the heart of Bloomsbury to brand-new, cutting-edge buildings supporting our research and innovation. Much of the estate is connected to heat networks.

With this vast estate and tens of thousands of people, our pathway to net zero and climate resilience is challenging. However, we are making great progress and were ranked 1st in the UK, 3rd in Europe, and 5th globally according to QS’s 2025 Global Sustainability rankings.

With the help of the UCL Climate Action Unit, we hosted our first Living Lab workshop on January 14th to identify key challenges and pain points for research and innovation. The workshop brought together a diverse group of participants, including researchers, professional service staff, and students. Among the attendees were representatives from our energy management team, advanced research computing team, research coordination office, and sustainable UCL team, as well as elected officials and leading academics from disciplines such as Chemistry, Behavioural Research, and Materials Engineering.

A key challenge of conducting impactful research is understanding the problem, user needs, and the potential for change. Attendees were asked to prepare and pitch their top problems or issues. Through group exercises and debates, these were refined and prioritised.

There was a fantastic variety of problems for people to vote on, ranging from efficient energy use during holidays and resource efficiency on campus to our approach to computing and research needs. The team is now busy whittling these down to a handful of the most material and impactful problem briefs that we can fund UCL staff and students to solve, pilot, and scale up.

Finally, we want to say a big thank you to everyone for showing up and collaborating in a truly open and inclusive way. The success of this event demonstrates the importance of including all stakeholders within the University to highlight issues and solutions, we are now planning future Grand Challenge Living Labs to utilize the true power of UCL — namely you!

Find out more about UCL’s Grand Challenge of Climate Crisis on our website and keep up to date with our progress on LinkedIn.