Frans Berkhout

Frans Berkhout is Professor of Environment, Society and Climate in the Department of Geography and Assistant Principal (King's Climate & Sustainability) and Assistant Principal (Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression) at King’s College London.

He joined King's in 2013. From 2015 to 2021 he served as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy. Before that, he was Director of the Future Earth programme, based at the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Paris. Prof Berkhout directed the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in The Netherlands (2004-2012), while also being founding Director of the Amsterdam Global Change Institute.

Among other advisory roles, Professor Berkhout was a lead author in two Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007 and 2014). He sits on the editorial boards of Journal of Industrial Ecology, Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning and The Anthropocene Review. He is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for contributions to the IPCC.

Research:
Systems innovation: the theoretical, methodological and empirical study of change in large socio-technical systems, including energy, transport, agro-food and urban systems. His work is informed by the history, economics and sociology of technical change and is concerned with understanding and informing ‘transitions’ towards more sustainable systems of provision. His recent work has sought to bridge between modelling, transitions studies and action research approaches to understanding transition processes, and to understand the mobility and wider influence of sustainability experiments.
Climate change adaptation: research on the incentives, constraints and limits to adaptation by organisations and other social actors. His work is informed by behavioural organisational theory and policy studies, understanding that the adaptive capacity of actors is institutionally-situated. His interest flows from work in the IPCC on ‘limits to adaptation’ and the application of a risk-based approach that he helped develop for the problem of ‘loss and damage’ in the UNFCCC. He is interested in developing approaches to specifying limits to adaptation that may inform novel approaches to the governance of losses suffered as actors reach such limits.

Co-production of knowledge: sustainability science and research deals with deep and complex problems and aims to inform awareness and change. Environmental knowledge is distributed and changes in policy and practice are more likely when researchers and practitioners collaborate in producing knowledge. He has promoted and written about this more integrated approach to knowledge, and his current focus is through CLARITY-Africa, a Wellcome Trust-funded project on climate and health in Ghana and Rwanda.

Early research was concerned with the economic, political and security aspects of civil and military nuclear power. Over the last 25 years, Berkhout's work has been concerned with science, technology, policy and sustainability, with a focus on climate change. His main academic contributions have been to the understanding of innovation in socio-technical systems and adaptation to climate change impacts by organisations, including potential limits to adaptation.