Centring Families in Iceland’s Just Transition

This interdisciplinary project will advance new ways of thinking about low-carbon energy transition and social, environmental and climate justice through a focus on the families of Iceland. In doing so, this project will foreground the family in Iceland’s climate action policy in order to achieve the aim of driving forward just transition for families across the country.

The Icelandic Government’s action plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040 overlooks families as key stakeholders, despite the fact that families are directly impacted by changing climate and the actions taken to achieve carbon neutrality. This interdisciplinary project addresses this ‘missing link’ in Iceland’s climate action policy. It does so through two interlocking strands. The first strand of the project analyses post Independence Icelandic literature and films to develop a deeper understanding of how climate change has marked family lives over the years and what lessons can be learned from the past. The second strand adopts an ethnographic approach to capture the impact of climate policy on contemporary Icelandic families. By drawing together historical and contemporary understandings of climate action and family life, the project will identify what additional state support and policy changes are needed to centre families in Iceland’s just transition.

Public and policy discourse on climate change is dominated by the hegemony of natural sciences and predictive climate modelling which feeds into the targets set by the Icelandic government for businesses and industries. Turning climate into a known element of predictive models and viewing a carbon neutral future solely through such a prism has inadvertently foreclosed other modes of thinking that can help place social, environmental and climate justice at the heart of low-carbon energy transition. There is a paucity of research that go beyond these frameworks to explore and analyse the broader cultural context of the way family life intersects with Iceland's changing climate, and demonstrate how climate change and energy transition have marked the cultural imagination of Iceland in a longer historical perspective. Driven by this need, this interdisciplinary project has been co-designed with key stakeholders to foreground families in Iceland’s just transition.

This project will develop deep understandings of family life to inform and influence climate action policies in Iceland with the aim of enabling a just transition to carbon neutrality for families across the country. It will do so by adopting an interdisciplinary approach that ingrates both historical and contemporary understandings in order to produce rich, nuanced and actionable understandings that juxtapose lessons from the past and present in order to facilitate a just and equitable transition. The project aim will be addressed through two inter-locking strands that integrate the humanities and the social sciences. The first strand will develop deeper understandings of the way the impact of climate change has marked family lives in Iceland since its independence in 1944, identifying shifts in cultural imaginations through ecocritical analysis of Icelandic literature and films. This will lay the foundation for work on the second strand of the project which will build on these historical and cultural insights to engage contemporary families across multiple regions of Iceland, to foreground their lived experiences and aspirations for a carbon neutral future. Drawing together insights from the past, as captured in Icelandic cultural texts, and contemporary lived experiences of families will provide historically-aware syncretic understandings that can be powerfully applied to develop effective policies and interventions that can minimise the adverse implications of climate change and maximise the potential benefits of climate action for families.

This 2-year project has been funded by the British Academy as part of its Knowledge Frontiers 2025 programme with a total funding of £308,306 (British Academy's contribution is £294,842).

This project build on pilot work funded by Brunel's Research Development Fund (RDF)