The Centre for Net Positive is focused on
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At The Net Positive Centre, we focus on what’s possible — turning the climate challenge into an opportunity to support healthier lives and to improve the environment.
Climate change is an urgent health issue that’s reshaping how we live, from rising heat, shifting disease patterns, and mental health stress.
By rethinking our cities, growing greener spaces, and transforming food systems, we can reduce emissions and ensure we’re not just responding to change but helping to shape a healthier, more resilient future.
What we do
Research
An integrated, interdisciplinary team of academics, analysts, professionals, and public groups collaborate at the Net Positive Centre to deliver innovative and impactful research on the complex links between climate change and health. Our team brings together expertise from a wide range of fields to tackle environmental, social, and health inequalities that affect people throughout their lives. We prioritize addressing emerging challenges relevant to the UK, creating equitable solutions that improve health outcomes across diverse communities.
Funding
The Net Positive Challenge Fund will help to build a strong community of researchers, partner organisations, and the public to achieve the Centre’s goals. With £500,000 available over five years, it supports new research, training, engagement, and impact activities that respond to emerging issues and changing policy priorities. This fund encourages innovative ideas and collaborations that can make a real difference in climate and health solutions.
Training
We offer collaborative, interdisciplinary training and capacity-building programs designed for academic researchers, policymakers, practitioners, industry professionals, and community members at all career stages. Our approach prioritizes the co-production of knowledge by actively breaking down traditional hierarchies between experts and communities, ensuring that lived experience, local knowledge, and diverse perspectives are equally valued alongside academic expertise.
Communities
We engage a wide range of communities—across ages and locations—to ensure diverse knowledge and values guide our work. Our approach embeds sustainability, equality, diversity, and inclusion by working closely with vulnerable groups and fostering a positive, inclusive research culture beyond academia. Through funding for arts-based methods, seed projects, and researcher placements in partner organisations, we support collaboration, innovation, and knowledge sharing.
Teign estuary | Red Zeppelin
Led by The University of Exeter and partners across the UK, we are a national focus for research, networking and capacity building.
We provide the basis for furthering scientific advances, policy advice and innovation that will address climate-environment-health inequalities across the life course.
