Alina R Congreve
Higher education and climate change professional with 18 years experience working in universities, public policy and innovation.
Currently freelance to follow a passion for enabling and supporting others to reach their full potential within the sectors of education, the built environment and climate change. From 2002-2016 I worked as a lecturer and principal lecturer at a number of universities including Reading, UCL, LSE and Hertfordshire.
Specialities:
Embedding sustainability in higher education institutions
City scale action on climate change
Low and zero carbon buildings
Post-war New Towns
Ecosystem services and natural capital
Design and delivery of professional development and higher education programmes
High level professional skills
Research and analytical skills, policy analysis, network co-ordination, stakeholder engagement, partnership management, collaborative working, event management, workshop facilitation, research project management, supporting innovation.
I have undertaken a broad range of applied research projects working for think tanks, professional bodies and membership organisations. These have involved high level research skills in qualitative interviewing, policy reviews, workshop facilitation, statistical analysis and data visualisation.
Several projects have developed my PhD research on new housing development, looking at the positive role cities can play in supporting the design and delivery of sustainable new homes. Other research projects explored new fields including: embedding sustainability in universities; new pathways into green jobs; resource efficiency in construction; new towns; climate action planning; sustainable tourism; and ecosystem services. These projects combine deep technical knowledge of sustainability with strong communication skills to engage non-technical audiences.
Alongside policy-focused research, I have lead on the design and delivery of postgraduate and professional development programmes. At the University of Hertfordshire, I initiated and led the MSc in sustainable planning. The course has a strong focus on sustainable energy, placemaking, sustainable communities and development viability. I worked closely with professional bodies in the programme design, and the course is fully accredited by the RTPI and IEMA.
All of my teaching is built on a foundation of supporting participants acquiring skills and subject knowledge that they can then apply to real world problems. I am committed to developing problem solving, innovation, collaboration and creative thinking among my students. I currently support PhD students and early career researchers as a Vitae associate and work on the Early Careers programme for CIEEM.
Currently freelance to follow a passion for enabling and supporting others to reach their full potential within the sectors of education, the built environment and climate change. From 2002-2016 I worked as a lecturer and principal lecturer at a number of universities including Reading, UCL, LSE and Hertfordshire.
Specialities:
Embedding sustainability in higher education institutions
City scale action on climate change
Low and zero carbon buildings
Post-war New Towns
Ecosystem services and natural capital
Design and delivery of professional development and higher education programmes
High level professional skills
Research and analytical skills, policy analysis, network co-ordination, stakeholder engagement, partnership management, collaborative working, event management, workshop facilitation, research project management, supporting innovation.
I have undertaken a broad range of applied research projects working for think tanks, professional bodies and membership organisations. These have involved high level research skills in qualitative interviewing, policy reviews, workshop facilitation, statistical analysis and data visualisation.
Several projects have developed my PhD research on new housing development, looking at the positive role cities can play in supporting the design and delivery of sustainable new homes. Other research projects explored new fields including: embedding sustainability in universities; new pathways into green jobs; resource efficiency in construction; new towns; climate action planning; sustainable tourism; and ecosystem services. These projects combine deep technical knowledge of sustainability with strong communication skills to engage non-technical audiences.
Alongside policy-focused research, I have lead on the design and delivery of postgraduate and professional development programmes. At the University of Hertfordshire, I initiated and led the MSc in sustainable planning. The course has a strong focus on sustainable energy, placemaking, sustainable communities and development viability. I worked closely with professional bodies in the programme design, and the course is fully accredited by the RTPI and IEMA.
All of my teaching is built on a foundation of supporting participants acquiring skills and subject knowledge that they can then apply to real world problems. I am committed to developing problem solving, innovation, collaboration and creative thinking among my students. I currently support PhD students and early career researchers as a Vitae associate and work on the Early Careers programme for CIEEM.
less
InterestsView All (60)
Uploads
Research papers by Alina R Congreve
Service and pensions and sick pay. Moving to a home in a New Town was transformational for the early residents leaving behind overcrow-
ded and bomb-damaged cities or insanitary mining communities. New Towns were designed to eradicate inner-city ‘urban disease’, providing
residents with good-quality housing, solving overcrowding and benefiting wellbeing. New Towns had a social mission to equalise opportunity
and remove the distinctions in existing towns between suburban villas for professionals and tenements for factory hands (Colenutt 2020).
Thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust, which has awarded a £415,000 (approx. €470,000) project grant, the New Jerusalems project
is making the archives from eleven post-war New Towns in England, Wales and the Republic of Ireland, accessible to researchers for the first
time. This will fundamentally change the evidence base currently available for researchers of the New Town movement, and offer a significant
new resource for researching the impact of housing and urban design on public health. These archives are being catalogued and secured for
the future through conservation and preservation work.
1. What are some of the practical considerations that arise from recent efforts to implement an ecosystem services approach?
2. What are some of the differing views among professional and academic ecologists that shape the development of mainstreaming ecosystem services policy and practice?
3. What are some of the challenges and opportunities for biodiversity conservation when implementing an ecosystem services approach?
The low/zero carbon homes agenda was launched in 2006 with the aim of establishing ‘performance orientated’ policy tools, including a complementary mix of mandatory national regulations, voluntary and quasi-voluntary standards. Regulations and standards were widely viewed as too complex, and this report considers if they have been streamlined or watered down.
The paper challenges the widespread perception that little or nothing can be done by local authorities in the current political climate. Working with progressive developers, it highlights how local government can play a leadership role in delivering sustainability in the built environment. It also explores the potential for cities to take
new powers to address sustainability in the built environment through their devolution deals. The paper considers:
■ what city, combined and local authorities can do to raise standards using their current planning powers;
■ how they can proactively use their role as landowners; and
■ how they could engage with the devolution agenda.
mate change is forcing a number of sectors of the economy,
including house building, to give more weight to environ-
mental issues. Concern about climate change has been
heightened in the United Kingdom following the publica-
tion of the Stern Review that highlights the damage to the
UK economy by failing to take action. Domestic energy use
contributes almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions
from the United Kingdom (DEFRA, 2008). Choice of
building materials, their extraction and processing, trans-
port, and as the building process all have environmental
implications. These include the landscape impacts, not just
of greenfield building but the extraction industries that
support them, pollution, impact on water resources, and
energy costs. The environmental standards to which a
house is built will have long-term implications for sustain-
ability issues such as energy efficiency. The way in which
we build houses is therefore an issue of global environ-
mental importance. This section examines the
environmental implications of the residential construction
industry during various stages of the building process.
Pedagogical research by Alina R Congreve
We explored recruitment and the skills gap with a wide range of employers: local government; government regulators; private sector consultancies; and environmental NGOs. Our participants came from large, medium sized and smaller organisations, across the UK and Ireland. The workshops revealed a strong consensus on the seriousness and urgency of the skills gap and capacity crisis in the ecology sector. From the employers’ perspective, there was frustration that new graduates lacked key ecology and professional skills. There was strong interest from employers to investigate how they could open up ecology jobs to young people with vocational qualifications and mid-career changers.
We also engaged with new entrants into ecology and the barriers they faced starting out. Structural issues identified in
the profession included low pay, short-term contracts, irregular working hours, requirements for car ownership, unclear career progression, and insufficient professional development. Most were undertaking substantial unpaid voluntary work, to gain essential skills and experience needed to start their first ecology job. The heavy reliance on this kind of volunteering to develop essential skills is not found in related professions such as Landscape Architecture and Planning. Reliance on volunteering to develop these skills is making a challenging recruitment situation worse, and contributes to the lack of diversity in the sector
in a graduate job. It is widely viewed as beneficial in improving students’ employability. Opportunities for students to experience authentic learning are very uneven, and there are significant barriers that currently limit more widespread adoption. What role can academic developers play to help teaching teams overcome these barriers and make sure authentic approaches are more embedded
in the curriculum?
Book Reviews by Alina R Congreve
Service and pensions and sick pay. Moving to a home in a New Town was transformational for the early residents leaving behind overcrow-
ded and bomb-damaged cities or insanitary mining communities. New Towns were designed to eradicate inner-city ‘urban disease’, providing
residents with good-quality housing, solving overcrowding and benefiting wellbeing. New Towns had a social mission to equalise opportunity
and remove the distinctions in existing towns between suburban villas for professionals and tenements for factory hands (Colenutt 2020).
Thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust, which has awarded a £415,000 (approx. €470,000) project grant, the New Jerusalems project
is making the archives from eleven post-war New Towns in England, Wales and the Republic of Ireland, accessible to researchers for the first
time. This will fundamentally change the evidence base currently available for researchers of the New Town movement, and offer a significant
new resource for researching the impact of housing and urban design on public health. These archives are being catalogued and secured for
the future through conservation and preservation work.
1. What are some of the practical considerations that arise from recent efforts to implement an ecosystem services approach?
2. What are some of the differing views among professional and academic ecologists that shape the development of mainstreaming ecosystem services policy and practice?
3. What are some of the challenges and opportunities for biodiversity conservation when implementing an ecosystem services approach?
The low/zero carbon homes agenda was launched in 2006 with the aim of establishing ‘performance orientated’ policy tools, including a complementary mix of mandatory national regulations, voluntary and quasi-voluntary standards. Regulations and standards were widely viewed as too complex, and this report considers if they have been streamlined or watered down.
The paper challenges the widespread perception that little or nothing can be done by local authorities in the current political climate. Working with progressive developers, it highlights how local government can play a leadership role in delivering sustainability in the built environment. It also explores the potential for cities to take
new powers to address sustainability in the built environment through their devolution deals. The paper considers:
■ what city, combined and local authorities can do to raise standards using their current planning powers;
■ how they can proactively use their role as landowners; and
■ how they could engage with the devolution agenda.
mate change is forcing a number of sectors of the economy,
including house building, to give more weight to environ-
mental issues. Concern about climate change has been
heightened in the United Kingdom following the publica-
tion of the Stern Review that highlights the damage to the
UK economy by failing to take action. Domestic energy use
contributes almost a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions
from the United Kingdom (DEFRA, 2008). Choice of
building materials, their extraction and processing, trans-
port, and as the building process all have environmental
implications. These include the landscape impacts, not just
of greenfield building but the extraction industries that
support them, pollution, impact on water resources, and
energy costs. The environmental standards to which a
house is built will have long-term implications for sustain-
ability issues such as energy efficiency. The way in which
we build houses is therefore an issue of global environ-
mental importance. This section examines the
environmental implications of the residential construction
industry during various stages of the building process.
We explored recruitment and the skills gap with a wide range of employers: local government; government regulators; private sector consultancies; and environmental NGOs. Our participants came from large, medium sized and smaller organisations, across the UK and Ireland. The workshops revealed a strong consensus on the seriousness and urgency of the skills gap and capacity crisis in the ecology sector. From the employers’ perspective, there was frustration that new graduates lacked key ecology and professional skills. There was strong interest from employers to investigate how they could open up ecology jobs to young people with vocational qualifications and mid-career changers.
We also engaged with new entrants into ecology and the barriers they faced starting out. Structural issues identified in
the profession included low pay, short-term contracts, irregular working hours, requirements for car ownership, unclear career progression, and insufficient professional development. Most were undertaking substantial unpaid voluntary work, to gain essential skills and experience needed to start their first ecology job. The heavy reliance on this kind of volunteering to develop essential skills is not found in related professions such as Landscape Architecture and Planning. Reliance on volunteering to develop these skills is making a challenging recruitment situation worse, and contributes to the lack of diversity in the sector
in a graduate job. It is widely viewed as beneficial in improving students’ employability. Opportunities for students to experience authentic learning are very uneven, and there are significant barriers that currently limit more widespread adoption. What role can academic developers play to help teaching teams overcome these barriers and make sure authentic approaches are more embedded
in the curriculum?