Holly Mellor

Urban pollution: ecosystems and policy change

The project:
Grantham Scholar Holly Mellor's project addresses the challenge of chemical pollution in urban environments from a policy standpoint. Current environmental regulations are often designed and implemented within policy silos, which makes it difficult to capture cross-cutting challenges or understand how different chemicals interact with one another in specific contexts. There is also limited evidence on how to identify human sources (both domestic and industrial) of chemical pollution in cities in order to design effective interventions.

Over the course of the project, Holly aims to map the urban ecosystem and the chemicals used within it to identify key points of intervention and pathways for improving sustainability outcomes across all levels of governance. This process will involve producing a systematic evidence map of chemical risks to urban ecosystems, then developing a causal loop diagram in order to assess potential intervention points.