Dr. David Howard

David is a UKCEH Fellow, formerly the Director of Lancaster Environment Centre’s Centre for Sustainable Energy.

He worked for the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology for over a quarter of a century on a variety of projects on land use and energy. From the 1980s he was at the core of the team managing the Countryside Surveys (CS), Britain’s assessment of the state and change of its rural environment. He used CS data to look at a variety of energy systems (wood energy, wind, hydro, nuclear, traditional fossil fuels) and their impacts (including carbon sequestration/inventory, critical loads of atmospheric deposition of sulphur, nitrogen and ozone and land take) and led the project creating the Countryside Information System (CIS). David worked on European projects that looked at the economics of energy (including ExternE). Once the problems of the energy system were acknowledged (environmental damage, security of supply, innovation for economic growth and poverty reduction) he became one of the founding Directors of the UK Energy Research Centre; he led the theme of Environmental Sustainability which included bioenergy. At the same time he sat on the Board of Governors of the Joule Centre.

Since then he led a number of projects including Energyscapes and Ecosystem Services that has examined the whole system impact of changes to our energy system. David has collaborated on many multi and interdisciplinary projects and worked with both policy advisors and businesses. He held a NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, focussing in on environmental monitoring.