Category: Talks

Thank you to the Society of Circular, Regenerative, and Sustainable Systems for inviting Xinfang Wang, Louise Reardon, Asha Singh and I to speak at their inaugural webinar on 20th May 2021.

Our talk was about ‘A Participatory Approach for Visualising Energy Resilience in Nepal from a Whole-System Perspective’.

Understanding how and in what ways to foster resilience within energy systems is a complex issue, encapsulating a diversity of factors. This complexity creates barriers to effective decision-making towards resilience, where a whole-systems approach is required amidst a relatively siloed governance landscape.

To support decision making in this area, this talk discussed how a bottom-up participatory approach can be valuable in enabling decision-makers and key stakeholders to visualise the complexity of energy systems resilience, and in turn help facilitate the application of a whole-systems approach to the design of sustainable policy interventions towards more resilient systems.

The talk outlined the participatory causal loop mapping approach, highlight the method’s value in identifying the variables and visualising interconnections affecting energy resilience in Nepal, as a case study. Nepal has experienced energy supply disruption from both long-term energy supply deficiency and short-term shocks. The outcomes of our bottom-up participatory workshop with key stakeholders show the significant benefit of using this approach to enable participants visualising the complexity of energy systems resilience and creating a shared understanding of ways in which resilience can be improved.

It was a pleasure to present a webinar on ‘Energy resilience in the Global South: the vital role of communities’ at the Centre for Data Science at the Coventry University on 14th May 2021. The talk covered the need for research on energy resilience, the vital role that communities play in creating solutions and an overview of my current work in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

You can read more about the webinar here.

I was delighted to join for the Renewable Energy Workshop at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Resource Management Week 2021 on 26 April. The workshop focused on integrated water-energy management and I contributed to a panel on ‘Should integrated energy companies have integrated information systems?’. The panel discussed the value that the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources brings to different stakeholders.

Read more about the UNECE Resource Management Week 2021 here.

I was delighted to present a paper on ‘Community energy resilience in the era of climate change’ at the New Climate Urbanism workshop on 4-5 September 2019 hosted by the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. The international workshop explored the changing relationship between cities and climate change.

Read more about the workshop here.

I’m looking forward to speaking at the UK Energy Research Centre  (UKERC) Annual Assembly at the University of Sheffield on Thursday 12th July 2018. Join me at the Networking Fund session for an update on the Research Collaborations for Community Energy Resilience in Low-Income Countries project.

Learn more about the UKERC Whole Systems Network Fund which supports the project here.

Long Seng To speaking at the LCEDN Annual Conference 2018. Photo by Joni Cook.

I was delighted to launch the Research Collaborations for Community Energy Resilience project on 1 June 2018 with two conference sessions at the LCEDN Annual Conference held at Loughborough University, UK called ‘Under the Grid’ and ‘Resilience Concepts for Energy’. I gave a presentation about community energy resilience in Nepal after the 2015 earthquake.

Read more about the conference here.

Participants of Practical Challenges of Sustainable Electrification in Africa workshop, Oxford University

I was very pleased to represent my Nature Energy paper on ‘Mapping synergies and trade-offs between energy and the Sustainable Development Goals’ at the Practical Challenges of Sustainable Electrification in Africa workshop at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, University of Oxford on 7th June 2018.

Read the full paper here.