Leslie Mabon
Senior Lecturer in Environmental Systems, Faculty of STEM, Open University, UK. Sustainability science for resilient and just coastal places. Scotland - Japan - Taiwan. Future Earth Coasts Fellow. Big Raith Rovers fan.
resilientcoastal.zone
- Helpful thread here on UKRI + strategy. Vital in any cross-disciplinary calls that arts, humanities + social sciences have a central and transformative role, and hopefully aren't seen as 'service sciences' stuck on at the end of the pipe to assess public opinion or 'convince' the public about tech.
- Really grim to see this, but sadly it seems to be the direction of travel that's been on the cards for a few years now: curiosity-driven research funding for the elites, policy support- and industrial collaboration projects for the rest of us. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
- A pleasure to be back in Tiree to progress the Ecological Citizens Network+-funded project on coastal change Tiree CDT & myself are leading. Grateful to everyone who came to the drop-in session (was talking non-stop for 2.5 hours!) and shared their thoughts on our plans for the project and beyond.
- Reposted by Leslie MabonLots of folks getting radicalized by the snow across much of the country right now. What gets plowed, when it gets plowed, and how often it gets plowed reveals a lot about your city's priorities and who it values.
- Reposted by Leslie MabonPeer review science relies, more than we care to admit, on what @zey.bsky.social calls "load bearing frictions" that make it difficult to fake good science, and on trust that most ppl also value science itself & won't cheat just for personal gain. This creates the wrong environment for that to hold.
- OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free. Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier. It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct. prism.openai.com
- Reposted by Leslie MabonA reward structure that favours productivity over quality will always incentivise the use of tools that make it easier to generate papers. Who cares if anyone actually reads them?
- Writing - and the thinking that comes with it - is one of the parts of my job I enjoy the most. If you asked me to make a list of parts of my job that I wanted to outsource to AI, the writing up of research would probably be bottom of the list by a very long way. It's a giant NOPE from me.
- Notwithstanding the fact this would have been a legitimately scary experience for those involved, it is heartening to see Scottish people in the replies and quotes at the rate of one person per hour pointing out this is basically the episode of Still Game with Robbie Coltrane.
- Interesting from @beyond-coal.jp about apparent lack of meaningful engagement on possible CCS project off Chiba. Remember too this is near part of Japan that was due to host a major offshore wind project that was shelved. Residents will have legitimate concerns about infrastructure + process.
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- Interdisciplinary researchers when discussions about the REF come up.
- A hill I am prepared to die on is that the Terminator films were sent as a warning about the dangers of de-funding humanities and social science research, and failing to embed ethics and responsible innovation within STEM-driven research, development and deployment proggrammes.
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- New paper on just transition, policy knowledge + offshore wind in Nagasaki, Japan. I argue that whilst sharing best practice is valuable, it risks undermining just transitions elsewhere if we don't ask who benefits from this knowledge being shared and adopted: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...
- Since school bus discourse is going on: I remember one day everyone who travelled on a specific bus got pulled out of class and marched to the hall, because someone threw a yoghurt out the window from the top deck and it hit a horse, and they needed to find out who did it.
- It did not rain for the first time in nearly a fortnight today, so I took the day off at very short notice and cycled from Kilmartin to Tayvallich and back over the Crinan Canal. This turned out to be a very good idea.
- Big shout out to whichever school or department on the OU campus was having the music round of their Christmas quiz with the window open as I walked past yesterday with my coffee - you eliminated me from #Whamageddon 😒 Other than that, you're all fantastic folk to work with! 🙂
- New paper on temperate coastal forests, the values they bring to people, and how environmental management can support these forests in a changing climate. Enabled by @royalsociety.org International Exchanges grant w/@openuniversity.bsky.social + Klaipeda University. link.springer.com/article/10.1...
- I recently appeared on @footpolpodcast.bsky.social to discuss football, industry, place identity and a just transition - with a healthy dose of examples including Iwaki FC, Airdrie keeper John Martin, and the offshore wind supply chain permeating Raith Rovers: www.buzzsprout.com/2253650/epis...
- Science of the Total Environment delisted. Any time a story like this breaks, I have a great deal of sympathy for other authors who have published their research in the journal in good faith, and for the reviewers and editors who have done their job properly. english.elpais.com/science-tech...
- This is going to sound a bit salty, but - if you claim an author has not read widely enough, and then provide a list of 'key texts' written exclusively by white men at prestigious Western universities to make your point, then I would argue YOU have also not read widely enough.
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- I remember when stuff like this used to end the careers of people at all points along the political spectrum. Sadly, the news cycle will move on, and within a week he'll be back grabbing airtime, pint and cigarette in hand, as if nothing ever happened.
- Very geographically-specific safety information on KNB Toyama this week - stay away from farm ditches when drunk. Good advice.
- I will have retired by the time the West Highland Line is decarbonised. Class. www.scotsman.com/news/transpo...
- Another great @ouscotland.bsky.social Mock COP, this time in Dumfries! Really enjoyed talking to high school pupils from all over Dumfries and Galloway about what happens at international climate change negotiations, and very impressed with how engaged and knowledgeable the students were!
- Brilliant to see our @openuniversity.bsky.social Environmental Management: Pathways to Sustainability module reach fruition. The result of several years of research, writing, filming - and lots and lots of Teams meetings! Books are just one small - but very tangible - part of the OU experience #T330
- My wife Naoko Mabon is working in partnership with a number of artists and arts practitioners to develop a new curatorial initiative by and for Zambia. Please consider supporting and sharing if you can: whydonate.com/fundraising/...
- Terrific day at @ouscotland.bsky.social @howdec.bsky.social Mock COP in Inverness today. Talked to a group of students from all over the Highlands about what will happen at #COP30 - as well as the merits and drawbacks of the COP process, and what they can do as citizens. Feeling very energised!
- Through our @openuniversity.bsky.social partnership with the BBC, I've been working with The One Show on the future of fisheries in the UK. Wonderful to see Hans Unkles' fully-electrified boat, which fishes out of Tayvallich just down the road from me, featured: connect.open.ac.uk/the-one-show/
- An excellent paper by Anna Lena Bercht on navigating scepticism towards qualitative research in quantitative- or positivist-oriented fields. Good advice on how to advocate for one's methodological approach. Could have done with citing this earlier this week 😅 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
- Yes! This is also why I get so irate in online meetings when a session runs over and the chair says something like "let's just take a very quick three-minute comfort break". Some people - for a whole variety of reasons - need longer.
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- Very interesting documentary about population decline and lifeline rural railways in Hiroshima Prefecture. The irony of a train with a 'Rail is Baton' livery running on a line where the operator is pushing to shrink services due to lack of profitabilty. www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3WH...
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- This is hardly surprising when the operators of many social media platforms have filled their sites with so much advertising, clickbait and junk that you hardly see any of the content you signed up to see. In a desire to generate revenue, they've rendered their platforms unattractive and unusable.
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- A very full week in Aceh as part of @britishacademy.bsky.social supported study into evidence + policy for seawalls in Indonesia, building on @raeng.org.uk research. Great to see students of our partner Universitas Syiah Kuala learning how to check the characteristics and performance of seawalls.
- Reposted by Leslie Mabon📢We're hiring!📢 We have a permanent Lecturer in Earth Sciences position available in @OU_EEE @OpenUniversity £47,389 to £56,535 Closing Date: 20 October 2025* We are a friendly, research intensive school with supportive colleagues and great labs. jobs.open.ac.uk/job/Lecturer...
- A pleasure to be in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, to progress @britishacademy.bsky.social work on evidence-driven policy for seawalls with @openuniversity.bsky.social, Syiah Kuala Uni + London South Bank Uni. Honoured to deliver keynote for Aceh Intl Symposium on Civil Engineering today during our visit.
- Maybe I'm being too grumpy, but I foresee a time in the near future in the UK where only the most elite unis and depts are allowed to apply for open research funding, with the rest of us only eligible for select industry- and policy support calls. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
- Cycled from Oban to the former aluminium smelting town of Kinlochleven and back, 100 miles all-in including a couple of scenic detours on the way home. Now incapable of any form of movement.
- Mitsubishi Shoji's president visits Akita Prefecture to apologise for withdrawing from large-scale offshore wind projects. I am not an energy economist, but it is clear there is a LOT of disappointment among local government and potential supply chain companies: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgLF...
- Mitsubishi has pulled out of 3 big offshore wind projects in Japan. Meanwhile, other Japanese companies are investing in Scotland's offshore wind. The will and knowhow for Japanese businesses to do offshore wind is there - what's needed is supportive domestic policy. asia.nikkei.com/business/ene...
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- Oshima Shipbuilding of Saikai City - one of the biggest builders of bulk carriers in Japan - has released a new series of commericals featuring former pop idol and Nagasaki native Neru Nagahama as their 'specially appointed director of PR': www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgfd...
- Something quite unsettling about how impacts of climate change filter through into very banal and everyday aspects of our lives.
- It's been exactly 10 years to the month since I first visited the Institute of Human Geography at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences. Great timing to have our fourth paper together published, this time on just transitions and resource-dependent livelihoods: doi.org/10.3390/worl...
- Something I find really curious is that this comes off the back of a spate of offshore wind projects being postponed or cancelled in Japan. Japanese companies are notably more enthusiastic about pursuing offshore renewables in Scotland than they are in Japan. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
- This is an excellent point and, as with many posts about academia in other countries, holds true for the UK too if you change some of the wording.
- My life in a nutshell: searching for information on the development of Onahama port in Iwaki, Japan for a book chapter takes me to Getty Images, where the "More Search Results" heading offers me a library of photos of Gregory Tade circa 2010.
- Reposted by Leslie MabonNERC: We need to open up environmental science! Why is it not diverse? Also NERC: We're scrapping Independent Research Fellowships, New Investigator Grants, Small Grants, are limiting applications from institutions based on past success rates and will only allow you to submit your proposal once.
- Not surprising that one of the conditions of the 'climate visa' Australia is providing to Tuvaluans is an effective veto over Tuvalu's national security decisions. Remember that Tuvalu is one of the nations that formally recognises Taiwan as a country, too. asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Im...
- Reposted by Leslie Mabonwe would be in a much better state in this country if we stopped focusing on anointing a chosen few working class students into Oxbridge, and instead properly funded all the different sorts of universities that attract students from a wide range of backgrounds already
- Oxford University and @cam.ac.uk have each received a £6.25 million gift to expand their outreach work with socio-economically disadvantaged students in STEM subjects. Find out more ⬇️
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- I started reading this in strong agreement. But by the end I felt uncomfortable. "Useless papers" and "nothing new to contribute" are subjective judgements that smack of gatekeeping - especially as all but one interviewed are from 'prestigious' UK institutions. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
