Why you should study this programme

Environmental change is happening at unprecedented speed and is changing the world we live in. Human induced greenhouse gas emissions, land use change and unsustainable resource utilisation are affecting the global carbon cycle, water cycle and energy balance and consequently are a major contributor to climate change. The impacts can be felt in the form of extreme heat waves and summer droughts, forest fires, catastrophic flooding, water shortages and species extinction in most parts of the world.

The climate system interacts with the biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and geosphere at a range of temporal and spatial scales. To fully understand, mitigate and adapt to environmental change requires a multidisciplinary, global approach.

As a Global Environmental Change student you will develop a broad understanding of the physical processes and human impacts leading to environmental change. You will develop in-depth expertise in the area of your MSc dissertation. Specialists in this area are increasingly sought after by the private sector, international non-governmental organisations, the UN and government departments. The MSc can also be an ideal basis for pursuing a research career through a PhD later on.

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World Class Facilities

Students have access to state-of-the-art Physical Geography instrumentation. There are separate laboratories for environmental, molecular stable isotope and palaeoecological research that can be used to reconstruct past climates and environments, the preparation of thin sections, hardware modelling using rainfall simulation and flume channels as well as a large, general-purpose laboratory that recently been completely refurbished.

Additional resources include an Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometer, a Scanning Electron Microscope, a cold store, a Coulter Laser Diffraction particle size analyser, differential GPS and a wide range of field equipment. A new eddy covariance flux tower was purchased recently to measure carbon, energy and water fluxes between vegetation and the atmosphere.

The department has installed suites of PCs, LINUX work-stations and Virtual Reality Equipment (including a theatre) in several newly refurbished computing laboratories as a result of securing £3.9 million from HEFCE to house a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) on the subject of spatial literacy and spatial thinking.

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