Chris West

Chris West is the SEI York Deputy Director for Research and leads SEI York’s Sustainable Consumption and Production group. He has a multidisciplinary background encompassing environmental science, ecology, mathematics and economics. At SEI, he has led and contributed to a number of projects developing an understanding of the links between international supply chains and environmental impact and risk, which includes the development of SEI’s hybrid multi-regional input output model (IOTA) and material flow platform (Trase). He engages actively (including via workshops and other face-to-face activities) with policy, business and third-sector practitioners in the development of this work.

He is co-Investigator on a number of major international and national projects where he leads work on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of food supply chains and associated environmental and social impacts and risks. This includes the York-based IKnowFood project, the GCRF Trade, Environment and Development Hub (TRADE), and the H2020 Cascades project. Other work includes contribution to the NETpositive Initiative which is developing tools to introduce small and medium sized enterprise to economic, social and environmental sustainability, contributing to the data that underpins WWF UK’s carbon footprint calculators.

Chris comes from an ecology background, having completed a PhD in Fisheries Management in January 2011 which made use of agent-based modelling approaches, and has a broader interest in the study of complex systems and in particular the interplay between biological and environmental systems and society.