Charlie is a Professor of Energy and Climate Change and Senior Research Fellow in the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford. He is also a visiting research scholar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria.
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Charlie’s research lies at the intersection between innovation, people, and policy in the context of energy and climate change. He analyses the drivers and dynamics of change in energy transitions, both historically and into the future using scenarios and modelling. He is also interested in micro-scale processes of low-carbon innovation, digital technology adoption, and pro-environmental behavior. His research is supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Horizon Europe, and the UK Research Councils.
Charlie is particularly interested in the transformative potential of digitalization as a general-purpose technology affecting energy and materials demand, economic activity across sectors, society and behavior, and climate governance. He currently leads the iDODDLE project on the digitalization of daily life and its impacts on energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, combining work from local to global scales. He also leads the Oxford teams in European projects, including PRISMA on digitalization in net-zero pathways and CIRCEULAR on digitalization as an enabler of circular economy. Across all these projects, Charlie’s research seeks to understand how to harness digitalization trends to accelerate progress towards a zero-carbon energy system with people at its heart.
Charlie has published extensively on these topics in the scientific literature (Google Scholar, ORCiD). He also gives public lectures and talks on his research, some of which are online including one at the Oxford Martin School on digitalization and climate change.