Policy Press

Climate change, energy and sustainability

The work we publish creates an understanding of the connection between global discourses on climate change facts, specific policy responses and environmental law, contributing to ongoing debates in academia and beyond. It addresses the following UN Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy, Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, Goal 13: Climate Action, Goal 14: Life Below Water and Goal 15: Life on Land.

Our publishing links to the global project, including the UN Agenda 2030 and provides a solid foundation for international and domestic policies around global warming, to support building impactful democratic solutions. 

Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Climate change, energy and sustainability, we aim to address the following goals:

SDG Publishers compact logoSDG 7: Affordable and clean energySDG 12: Responsible consumption and productionSDG 13: Climate actionSDG 14: Life below waterSDG 15: Life on land

Showing 13-24 of 78 items.

Criminal Justice, Wildlife Conservation and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene

This book addresses one of today’s most urgent issues: the loss of wildlife and habitat. Combining conservation studies with a focus on animal rights, the chapters explore the successes and failures of the international treaties CITES and the BERN Convention.

Bristol Uni Press

Climate Litigation and Justice in Africa

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This volume brings together an international team of contributors to provide a much-needed examination of climate litigation in Africa. The book outlines how climate litigation in Africa is distinct as well as pinpointing where it connects with the global conversation.

Bristol Uni Press

Death’s Social and Material Meaning beyond the Human

This book provides an alternative focus for death studies by looking beyond traditional perspectives of a nature/culture binary. Bringing together a range of international scholars, it sheds light on topics which have previously remained at the margins of contemporary death studies and death care cultures.

Bristol Uni Press

The Environment in Global Sustainability Governance

Perceptions, Actors, Innovations

Edited by Lena Partzsch

With Agenda 2030, the UN adopted wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that integrate development and environmental agendas. This book has a unique focus on the political tensions between environmental and socio-economic objectives and advocates for a cooperative shift towards environmentally sound sustainability.

Bristol Uni Press

Theorising Justice

A Primer for Social Scientists

Justice is becoming increasingly important to climate change and economic development discussions. This book combines justice theories with their applications in policy and practice, to address the social, political, economic and ecological challenges we face today.

Bristol Uni Press

Gendering Green Criminology

The first volume in green criminology devoted to gender, this book investigates gendered patterns to offending, victimisation and environmental harms. The collection advances debate on green crimes and climate change and will inspire students and researchers to foreground gender in reducing the challenges affecting our planet’s future.

Bristol Uni Press

What Are Animal Rights For?

How should we treat animals? The field of animal rights raises pressing questions about how humans treat the other animals as livestock farming exerts an increasing toll on the planet, and we learn more about their capacity to think and experience pain. This book shows what the world might look like if animals had greater rights.

Bristol Uni Press

Reproduction, Kin and Climate Crisis

Making Bushfire Babies

Exploring the impact of climate change and the pandemic on people’s decisions to form families and their experience of having children, this book makes a valuable contribution to debates on contemporary planetary crises.

Bristol Uni Press

A Just Energy Transition

Getting Decarbonisation Right in a Time of Crisis

In this timely book, Ed Atkins asks: are we getting decarbonisation right? And how could it be made better for people and communities? In doing so, this book proposes a different type of energy transition. One that prioritises and takes opportunities to do better – to provide better jobs, community ownership and improve people’s homes and lives.

Bristol Uni Press

All We Want is the Earth

Land, Labour and Movements Beyond Environmentalism

This book traces a counter-history of modern environmentalism from the 1960s to the present day. It focuses on claims concerning land, labour and social reproduction arising at important moments in the history of environmentalism made by feminist, anti-colonial, Indigenous, workers’ and agrarian movements.

Bristol Uni Press

Policing Environmental Protest

Power and Resistance in Pandemic Times

Addressing the contemporary urban eco-justice movement, this book draws on the case studies of two protest groups in Trento, Italy. Analysing the practices and policing of environmental activism during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, this book identifies directions for future critical and green criminological research in the area.

Bristol Uni Press

Transforming Agriculture and Foodways

The Digital-Molecular Convergence

Agri-food systems in the Global North are experiencing a wave of technological innovation in food production and ways of eating. This book is the first to analyse technological and socio-economic change in leading food sectors and it concludes that despite innovation, the food industry is adapting too slowly to the challenges of climate change.

Bristol Uni Press


A selection of related journal articles

Volume 7, Number 1 of Global Discourse featuring:
Paris: optimism, pessimism and realism 
On the obsolescence of human beings in sustainable development
On preparing for the great gift of community that climate disasters can give us

Voluntary Sector Review themed section on 'Re-reading civil society action for environmental sustainability' featuring:
Shoots and leaves: exploring the impacts and fragile sustainability of sustainable place-making projects working with marginalised people
A part and yet apart: how third sector visions of carbon reduction are both welcomed and marginalised
The community economies of Esch-sur-Alzette: rereading the economy of Luxembourg [Open Access]
Assembling community energy democracies

Extinction Rebellion: social work, climate change and solidarity in Critical and Radical Social Work

Extinction Rebellion: a social worker’s observation in Critical and Radical Social Work

The gender dynamics of climate change on rural women's agro-based livelihoods and food security in rural Zimbabwe: implications for green social work in Critical and Radical Social Work

Climate change and food: a green social work perspective in Critical and Radical Social Work

Evidence reviews in energy and climate policy in Evidence & Policy

Contested knowledge in Dutch climate change policy in Evidence & Policy

Does risk-based decision-making present an ‘epistemic trap’ for climate change policymaking? in Evidence & Policy

British political values, attitudes to climate change, and travel behaviour in Policy & Politics

Policies, politics and organisational problems: multiple streams and the implementation of targets in UK government in Policy & Politics

Electricity market reform: so what's new? in Policy & Politics

What’s the Use of Green Shame? from the Global Discourse blog

Green shame: the next moral revolution? from Global Discourse