ECI logo

Profile

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.

Charlie’s research is 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, technology adoption, and pro-environmental behaviour. His research is supported by grants from the European Research Council (ERC), Horizon Europe, and the UK Research Councils, as well as support at Oxford from the Jackson Foundation.

He currently leads the iDODDLE project on the digitalisation 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 three different European consortia: the NAVIGATE project on improving the behavioural realism of net-zero pathways; the PRISMA project on capturing low-carbon lifestyles in policy analysis of energy transitions; and the CIRCEULAR project on digitalisation as an enabler of circular economy and net-zero goals. Across all these projects, Charlie’s research seeks to understand how to accelerate progress towards a zero-carbon energy system with people at its heart.

Charlie is also an active member of several international networks including GECKO PhD training on smart technologies, EDITS on energy demand innovations, and RCN-DEE on the digital economy.

Recently completed projects that Charlie led or was involved with include: SILCI on disruptive low-carbon innovations, EnergyREV on smart local energy systems, and the CAST centre on climate change and social transformation.

Charlie gives public lectures and talks on his research, some of which are online including one at the Oxford Martin School on digitalisation and climate change.

Prior to joining the ECI at Oxford, Charlie spent 11 years with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia (UK). He holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia (Canada) on the social and behavioural determinants of energy use. Before his PhD, he worked for a number of years in the private sector in both renewable energy and carbon finance.

For a full list of Charlie's publications, please go to his Google Scholar or ORCiD pages.

Publications

Fiander, J., Walker, C., Rowlands, I., Devine-Wright, P., Wilson, C., Soutar, I. and Gupta, R. (2024) “Energy democracy, public participation, and support for local energy system change in Canada”, Energy Research & Social Science, 113, p. 103526.
Walker, C., Rowlands, I., Devine-Wright, P., Soutar, I., Wilson, C., Gupta, R., Devine-Wright, H., Bishwokarma, J. and Ford, R. (2024) “The ‘four Ds’ and support for Local Smart Grids: analysis from national surveys in the UK and Canada”, Oxford Open Energy, 3, p. oiae004.
Sugiyama, M., Wilson, C., Wiedenhofer, D., Boza-Kiss, B., Cao, T., Chatterjee, J., Chatterjee, S., Hara, T., Hayashi, A., Ju, Y., Krey, V., Godoy León, M., Martinez, L., Masanet, E., Mastrucci, A., Min, J., Niamir, L., Pelz, S., Roy, J., Saheb, Y., Schaeffer, R., Ürge-Vorsatz, D., van Ruijven, B. and Shimoda, Y. (2024) “High with low: harnessing the power of demand-side solutions for high wellbeing with low energy and material demand”, Joule, 8(1), pp. 1–6.
Pettifor, H., Mastrucci, A., Wilson, C., van Ruijven, B., Agnew, M. and Le Gallic, T. (2023) “Endogenous simulation of low-carbon lifestyle change in global climate mitigation pathways”, Environmental Research Letters, 19(1).
Lee, S., Freer, M., Wood, R., Edelenbosch, O., Sharmina, M., Doelman, J., van Vuuren, D. and Wilson, C. (2023) “From future diets to dishes: communicating dietary shift associated with a 1.5°C scenario for Brazil, China, Sweden and the United Kingdom”, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 7.
Mastrucci, A., Niamir, L., Boza-Kiss, B. and Wilson, C. (2023) “Modeling low energy demand futures for buildings: current state and research needs”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 48(1), pp. 761–792.
Pettifor, H., Agnew, M. and Wilson, C. (2023) “A framework for measuring and modelling low-carbon lifestyles”, Global Environmental Change, 82.
Agnew, M., Pettifor, H. and Wilson, C. (2023) “Lifestyle, an integrative concept: cross-disciplinary insights for low-carbon research”, WIREs: Energy and Environment, 12(6).
Vrain, E. and Wilson, C. (2023) “Smart sustainable daily life: Insights from across the social sciences”, in. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), pp. 1–6.
Wilson, C., De Stercke, S. and Zimm, C. (2023) “Building back better: granular energy technologies in green recovery funding programs”, Joule, 7(6), pp. 1206–1226.