Rebecca Willis
Rebecca Willis is a British consultant and academic, who holds a professorship in energy and climate governance at the University of Lancaster. Her advisory work has addressed the intersection of environment, especially climate change and energy, with politics and public policy. Her research concerns environmental and sustainability policy.
Biography
Willis graduated with a BA in social and policy sciences from King's College, Cambridge in 1994 and took a master's degree in environment, development and policy at the University of Sussex in 1996.She spent a short time from 1997 to 1998 as a policy advisor at the European Parliament in Brussels.
She then became Head of Policy for the Green Alliance charity and directed the organisation from 2001 to 2004. She continues to be associated with the charity. In 2009, she introduced its Climate Change Leadership Programme for UK members of parliament.
From 2004 until it was closed in 2011, Willis was vice-chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, an advisory body to the UK governments.
She also undertook independent consulting from 2004 until 2017. This included advising the Lake District National Park on setting up a local low carbon budget and also the British Academy and Co-operatives UK on models for community ownership of energy. She was a non-academic member of the council of the UK government's Natural Environment Research Council from August 2011 until 2015.
From 2014, Willis has been associated with the University of Lancaster, where she was awarded a doctoral degree by publication in sociology in 2018 and appointed professor of practice in 2019.
She has been one of the expert leads for the UK Climate Assembly that began in 2019. Her role is to help this citizens' assembly stay focused, accurate and balanced when recommending how the UK can achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, in line with the Climate Change Act. In partial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the assembly's final report supported economic recovery measures that reduced greenhouse gases and encouraged green changes to lifestyles.
In 2020, Willis was awarded a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship. She took up the chair in energy and climate governance at Lancaster University in 2021.
Publications
Willis has authored and co-authored books, scientific publications and reports.Books
Too Hot to Handle? The Democratic Challenge of Climate Change, Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2020, , Basel: MDPI, 2022,Selected journal articles
- "", The Sociological Review, 66.3, pp. 475–491
- "", Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 3.3, pp. 885–903
- "", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117.20, pp. 10629–10630