Professor Vanesa Castan Broto

Faculty of Social Sciences

Professor of Climate Urbanism

A profile picture of Vanesa Castàn Broto
Profile picture of A profile picture of Vanesa Castàn Broto
v.castanbroto@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 7942
The Wave

Full contact details

Professor Vanesa Castan Broto
Faculty of Social Sciences
The Wave
2 Whitham Road
Sheffield
S10 2AH
Profile

I joined the University of Sheffield in September 2017, following an appointment as a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences. Since then, I have coordinated multiple consortiums researching climate urbanism and sustainable energy transitions funded by UKRI, the ERC, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, among others.

Currently, I am leading the international consortium JustGESI (advancing gender equality and social inclusion in the energy transition) and co-leading the project RURBANISE (to facilitate adaptation in informal settlements in cities in the Philippines). My recent work has focused on institutional ethnography as a method to challenge existing drivers of structural discrimination.

In September 2025, I was appointed as a member of the Independent Group of Scientists by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to write the 2027 Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR). 

Some of the recognition I have received for my work include the 2021 AXA Award for Climate Science, the 2016 Philip Leverhulme Prize for contributions to Geography, and the 2013 UN Momentum for Change Awards for Lighthouse Activities that support the Urban Poor. 

I am Associate Editor of npj Urban Sustainability, and I have just concluded my tenure as Associate Editor for Territory, Politics, Governance.

Research interests

At the Urban Institute, I coordinate the group working on Climate Urbanism, looking at how climate change is governed in urban areas and with what consequences. 

From 2020 to 2025, I led an international assessment of the potential of community energy to facilitate transitions to sustainable energy. The assessment was conducted by the team behind the project CESET. We wrote a book called Community Energy and Sustainable Energy Transitions, bringing together multiple experiences from different disciplines and from community energy managers on the ground. The project data can be analysed in a paper recently published in Nature Clean Energy. 

I coordinated the city-based research component of the project Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality (KNOW), whose objective was to learn from co-production experiences across the world. In November 2025, we published an edited collection called Coproduction of Knowledge in Action to showcase many positive examples of co-production and a comparative analysis of how different institutional and political conditions generate variegated approaches to co-production. The research was informed by a pressing concern with the potential of co-production to challenge epistemic injustices, lack of representation of minority groups, and advance intersectional analyses of participation. 

I led the project Low Carbon Action in Ordinary Cities (LO-ACT) to assess climate change innovation in less-examined urban areas around the world (the team focused on a sample of smaller cities in rapidly urbanising areas). The project delivered insights into the governance of climate change in cities, the quest for transformative change, and how place-based innovation could be fostered through different forms of inclusion. We also developed new methodologies, including a means to combine visual design and narrative biographies to analyse sustainability trajectories. The ideas of reparation and hope were particularly influential in this project. 

In addition to my current and recently completed projects, I have a long-standing interest in several topics: 

Infrastructure landscapes: Infrastructure landscapes are fascinating, and the landscape perspective opens up alternative ways to think about socio-ecological relations and how their aesthetics became a subtle form of politics. I wrote a book on this topic called Urban Energy Landscapes, but I am always interested in developing a landscape perspective. 

Environmental Justice: Environmental justice and its different manifestations have motivated me both as a political agenda and as a research agenda. Working with Linda Westman, we wrote a book called Urban sustainability and justice (open access), and I have continued engaging with the topic, particularly through the idea of imaginaries and imagination and the transformative potential of different narratives. 

Messiness and governance: The seeping of messiness into attempts to build authority over the urban environment has been a topic I have followed, articulating multiple forms of theorisation, including a book-length treatment with Harriet Bulkeley and Gareth Edwards called An Urban Politics of Climate Change, which focused on experiments. I have written on the politics of climate change in cities, but perhaps my two favourite papers on this topic are the ones that discuss messiness and contradictions.

I was a Lead Author for the 6th Assessment Report, Working Group II, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and I have contributed to various international reports, most recently contributing a chapter on resilient housing to the 2026 World Cities Report on The Global Housing Crisis.

Publications

Books

Journal articles

Book chapters

Preprints