Alison Smith

Biographic Data

ID3745903
NAMEAlison Smith
GIVEN NAMESAlison
FAMILY NAMESmith
SIGNATURESMITH A
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Oxford
ORCID0000-0003-3065-5377
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS72
TOTAL CITATIONS79
AUTHOR COUNT71
EDITOR COUNT1
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1953
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX5

  • Greening drylands: The potential and limits of afforestation as a nature-based solution in the Aralkum Desert

    Open AccessShahzoda Alikhanova, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLELand Use Policy2026

    Dryland afforestation is increasingly deployed as a Nature-based Solution (NbS) for climate mitigation and ecosystem restoration, yet its long-term effectiveness remains uncertain because carbon gains may be offset by biophysical trade-offs and water limitations. Existing assessments rarely integrate carbon sequestration, surface albedo, and climate vulnerability, limiting understanding of how these processes interact to determine restoration out…

  • Carrie Rickey , A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda

    Open AccessAlison Smith, A Hardy SmithARTICLEFrench Studies2026

    This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ .

  • Community (citizen) science for assessing nature's benefits: A systematic review and survey

    Open AccessRaphaella Mascia, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLEPeople and Nature2026

    The undervaluation of nature in decision‐making significantly contributes to the current global biodiversity crisis. However, assessing the benefits of nature for people is challenging, partly due to barriers in collecting relevant data. We therefore explore whether community (citizen) science could support holistic assessments of nature's benefits to inform national policies, using the UK as a case study. We use a mixed methods approach, featuri…

  • “We've Got to Keep You Where You Are”: Rent Banks as Eviction Prevention

    Open AccessAlison Smith, Hannah Brais et al.ARTICLECanadian Public Administration2026

    The last two decades have seen countless local, provincial, and even federal promises to end homelessness in Canada. These efforts to end homelessness have largely failed, and in many communities, there has been an increase in the number of people who are unhoused. We argue that preventing evictions for people who are at risk of losing their housing for financial reasons is a small but important part of larger efforts to prevent homelessness. We …

  • The revised oxford principles for net zero aligned carbon offsetting

    Open AccessInjy Johnstone, Myles Allen et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2025

  • A scoping review of social work with Roma and Traveller communities: Introducing the Roma model

    Open AccessDan Allen, Jackie Bolton et al.ARTICLEEuropean Journal of Social Work2025

    Although The Strasbourg Declaration on Roma presents a list of priorities that aim to address the social and economic marginalisation of Roma and Traveller people in Europe, the contribution that social work is making to efforts to achieve these aims is unclear. Therefore, a scoping review of current scholarship was conducted to summarise the existing body of knowledge and identify how social work can help to achieve The Strasbourg Declaration on…

  • Portraits and Poses: Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern Europe

    Open AccessAlison Smith, Alison A SmithARTICLERenaissance Quarterly2025

    Portraits and Poses: Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern Europe. Beatrijs Vanacker and Lieke van Deinsen, eds. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2022. 386 pp. €65. Open Access. - Volume 78 Issue 1

  • Relationships, Trust and Accountability, and Critical Reflexivity: Developing Quality Data with the “Hard to Reach

    Open AccessAnna Kopec, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLEPublic Opinion Quarterly2025References: 57

    Understanding the realities of members of marginalized communities is central to the advancement of social and behavioral sciences. We argue that the development of data accurately representing the perspectives and experiences of such communities is fundamentally contingent on relationships of trust and accountability, and on researcher critical reflexivity. We showcase our methodology in three vignettes based on how we conduct research with comm…

  • Third era’ parasport athletes and athlete ‘volunteer’ appearances (AVAs): A Relational Analysis

    Open AccessLuke Jones, Haydn Morgan et al.ARTICLEEuropean Journal for Sport and…2025References: 2

  • It's Not Our Responsibility, But We Need to Do Something: Explaining Local Government Responses to the Homelessness and Housing Crises

    Open AccessAlison SmithARTICLECanadian Journal of Political…2024Cited by: 1

    In the past five years, there has been a striking increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness, including unsheltered homelessness, across Canada (Infrastructure Canada, 2024). Facing this growing crisis, local governments are changing and expanding their responses. An important innovation is tiny homes, a form of deeply affordable and supportive housing for people leaving homelessness. In this brief article, I ask what explains loc…

  • Lived Expertise in Homelessness Policy and Governance

    Open AccessAnna Kopec, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLESocial Sciences2024Cited by: 2References: 78

    Lived expertise (LE) is a valuable form of expertise that can lead to more effective policymaking. Existing research points to important mechanisms for where and how to include LE. It also offers lessons around the potential exclusionary effects such mechanisms may have. In this article, we bring the discussions together and ground them in the Canadian case of homelessness. Failures in Canadian homelessness governance and policy highlight the uti…

  • A machine learning methodology to quantify the potential of urban densification in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc, United Kingdom

    Open AccessNahid Mohajeri, Alina Walch et al.ARTICLESustainable Cities and Society2023

    Regional-scale urban residential densification provides an opportunity to tackle multiple challenges of sustainability in cities. But framework for detailed large-scale analysis of densification potentials and their integration with natural capital to assess the housing capacity is lacking. Using a combination of Machine Learning Random Forests algorithm and exploratory data analysis (EDA), we propose density scenarios and housing-capacity estima…

  • Mapping Homelessness Research in Canada

    Open AccessAlison Smith, Alison K Smith et al.ARTICLEThe American Review of Canadian…2023

    What is known about homelessness in Canada? In this article, we present the results of a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed research produced on homelessness in Canada, in English and French, since 2000. We seek to map this literature in an effort at understanding how homelessness has been studied by researchers and to identify potential gaps in this impressive body of literature. The literature review included a two-stage process. Fir…

  • A decentralized approach to model national and global food and land use systems

    Open AccessAline Mosnier, Valeria Javalera-Rincon et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2023

    The achievement of several sustainable development goals and the Paris Climate Agreement depends on rapid progress towards sustainable food and land systems in all countries. We have built a flexible, collaborative modeling framework to foster the development of national pathways by local research teams and their integration up to global scale. Local researchers independently customize national models to explore mid-century pathways of the food a…

  • How can diverse national food and land-use priorities be reconciled with global sustainability targets? Lessons from the Fable initiative

    Open AccessAline Mosnier, Guido Schmidt‐Traub et al.ARTICLESustainability Science2022Cited by: 3References: 8

    There is an urgent need for countries to transition their national food and land-use systems toward food and nutritional security, climate stability, and environmental integrity. How can countries satisfy their demands while jointly delivering the required transformative change to achieve global sustainability targets? Here, we present a collaborative approach developed with the FABLE—Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land, and Energy—Consortium t…

  • Sustainable pathways towards climate and biodiversity goals in the UK: The importance of managing land-use synergies and trade-offs

    Open AccessAlison Smith, Paula A Harrison et al.ARTICLESustainability Science2022Cited by: 1References: 4

    The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-022-01242-8

  • Getting the message right on nature‐based solutions to climate change

    Open AccessNathalie Seddon, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLEGlobal Change Biology2021

    Nature‐based solutions (NbS)—solutions to societal challenges that involve working with nature—have recently gained popularity as an integrated approach that can address climate change and biodiversity loss, while supporting sustainable development. Although well‐designed NbS can deliver multiple benefits for people and nature, much of the recent limelight has been on tree planting for carbon sequestration. There are serious concerns that this is…

  • Evidence for the effectiveness of nature-based solutions to water issues in Africa

    Open AccessMike Acreman, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLEEnvironmental Research Letters2021

    There is increasing global interest in employing nature-based solutions, such as reforestation and wetland restoration, to help reduce water risks to economies and society, including water pollution, floods, droughts and water scarcity, that are likely to become worse under future climates. Africa is exposed to many such water risks. Nature-based solutions for adaptation should be designed to benefit biodiversity and can also provide multiple co-…

  • Mapping the effectiveness of nature‐based solutions for climate change adaptation

    Open AccessAlexandre M Chausson, Beth Turner et al.ARTICLEGlobal Change Biology2020

    Nature‐based solutions (NbS) to climate change currently have considerable political traction. However, national intentions to deploy NbS have yet to be fully translated into evidence‐based targets and action on the ground. To enable NbS policy and practice to be better informed by science, we produced the first global systematic map of evidence on the effectiveness of nature‐based interventions for addressing the impacts of climate change and hy…

  • Understanding the value and limits of nature-based solutions to climate change and other global challenges

    Open AccessNathalie Seddon, Alexandre M Chausson et al.ARTICLEPhilosophical Transactions of the…2020

    There is growing awareness that ‘nature-based solutions' (NbS) can help to protect us from climate change impacts while slowing further warming, supporting biodiversity and securing ecosystem services. However, the potential of NbS to provide the intended benefits has not been rigorously assessed. There are concerns over their reliability and cost-effectiveness compared to engineered alternatives, and their resilience to climate change. Trade-off…

  • A global approach to mapping the environmental risk of harbours on aquatic systems

    Open AccessPaloma F Valdor, Aina G Gómez et al.ARTICLEMarine Policy2020

  • Signing Black in America

    Alison Smith, Walt Wolfram et al.ARTICLEAmerican Speech2020Cited by: 1References: 5

    Research Article| May 01 2020 Signing Black in America: The Story of Black American Sign Language Alison Smith; Alison Smith North Carolina State University Alison Smith (née Eggerth) recently graduated from North Carolina State University with an M.A. in English with a concentration in linguistics. Prior to that, she obtained a degree in American Sign Language from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. During her graduate studies, Alis…

  • Advancing the use of scenarios to understand society’s capacity to achieve the 1.5 degree target

    Open AccessSimona Pedde, Kasper Kok et al.ARTICLEGlobal Environmental Change2019Cited by: 9References: 9

  • Citizen support for spending to reduce homelessness in Canada’s largest urban centres

    Carey Doberstein, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLEHousing Studies2019Cited by: 3References: 21

    We present the results of a randomized controlled survey experiment involving 1508 Canadians using hypothetical vignettes of homelessness experiences, allowing us to examine the extent to which Canadians who live in large urban centres hold different attitudes towards homeless populations and may differ systematically in terms of supporting expanding homelessness investments. The findings point to differences not only among major urban centres, b…

  • Multilevel policy from the municipal perspective: A pan‐Canadian survey

    Open AccessJ Lucas, Alison Smith et al.ARTICLECanadian Public Administration2019Cited by: 5References: 16

    Building on in‐depth case studies and extensive theory‐building by Canadian multilevel governance scholars, this article identifies and describes multilevel policy involvement by federal, provincial, municipal, private, and NGO actors in three policy phases and eighteen policy domains that specifically involve local governments in Canada. Drawing from an original pan‐Canadian survey of municipal mayors and councillors, we show that municipal poli…