Course description

Contemporary environmental challenges - from climate change to plastics pollution, deforestation, habitat and species loss, pandemics and growing environmental injustices - affect us all across diverse scales, cultures and geographies. They increasingly demand new ways of thinking, grounded in cutting-edge research, to enable us to move forward into more equitable and sustainable futures.

This course was created in response to this need. It brings together internationally recognised research groups and scholars from the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment to provide you with a critical appreciation of these multiple, intersecting challenges and the nature and politics of potential solutions.

Through a range of core and optional modules, you will engage with:

contemporary human geography thinking around environmental challenges, knowledges and futures

the emergent, interdisciplinary concept of the Anthropocene and its applications

contemporary and paleo-climatic and earth systems modelling

and the pernicious challenge of pollutants e.g. plastics in the environment.

You will have the opportunity to develop skills in GIS, Earth Observation and Remote Sensing, as well as a range of creative geographical methods, and in the real world application of these tools to the management of diverse environmental challenges. You will gain high-level skills in research design and implementation through an individual dissertation, and you will gain a firm grounding in ethics and the development of equitable research partnerships.

Our teaching is research-led: it reflects the passion and commitment of staff across our interdisciplinary School. We aim to produce graduates who not only share our passion for equitable, environmentally sustainable futures, but who have the skills and knowledge to help bring these about.

Careers and employability

This course is designed to train students from a range of academic backgrounds in contemporary critical debates and challenges which shape our environmental futures. It will equip students with fresh perspectives and ways of seeing and responding to these challenges, through its inter and multi-disciplinary approach. It aims to produce graduates capable of undertaking insightful, ethical research on these issues, drawing on a range of tools and methods, and of contributing professionally in pertinent fields. This course will thus provide you with a range of subject specific and transferable skills pertinent to careers in research, academia and a range of public sector, consultancy, NGO and other applications.