Addressing the complex challenges of climate change requires bringing together insights and expertise from across Oxford's divisions of Mathematical, Physical, and Life Sciences, Social Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Humanities. Within these, Oxford has a diverse portfolio of outstanding climate research spanning a vast array different departments, institutes and interdisciplinary schools.

For a takeaway overview of Oxford's climate research, click here for a pdf summary.

PDF last updated July 2021.

 

The ORA Climate Research Collection brings together the many journal articles, conference papers, working papers, preprints, and more - produced by the members of the University of Oxford, held with full text by ORA, as well as providing links to related climate research information and activities at the University at other locations.

We are interested in fast, small scale atmospheric processes such as clouds, convection, and turbulence.

Members of this research cluster work on both scientific and social scientific dimensions of the functioning of ecological and biogeographical systems, with principal interests in macroecology, island biogeography, diversity theory, ecosystem dynamics, conservation biogeography, conservation governance, biodiversity and climate adaptation and conservation and traditional ecological knowledge.

Our research team studies the microscopic flora of the oceans (phytoplankton) which account for half of the photosynthesis on our planet and provide the base of the marine food chain. Our group investigates the diversity and physiology of these single-celled organisms over a range of marine ecosystems, from the poles to the tropics. We use a variety of tools to do this: from molecular markers to earth-orbiting satellites.

The project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (2022-2025), examines the potential impact of climate change on early modern humans over the last 300,000 years. 

Research in the sciences has not succeeded in bringing about the necessary urgent and wide-ranging societal transformation that we need: the expertise, knowledge, imagination and values of Humanities and Social Sciences need to become central to public and policy conversations around how to respond and adapt to the climate emergency.

Research includes large-scale atmospheric circulation, ocean circulation and climate variability.

Our research addresses physical climate processes in the context of anthropogenic perturbations to the earth system as the underlying cause of climate change.

The “Varieties of Climate Vulnerability” (Climate Vulnerability) Project is a collaborative research project based in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford.

The CO2 Removal Hub (CO2RE) is a UKRI-funded gateway to research expertise on Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR). The programme focuses on solutions-led research into economically, socially, and environmentally scalable GGR options.

The Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative (CCLI) is a research, education, and outreach project focused on four Commonwealth countries: Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The CCLI is examining the legal basis for directors and trustees to consider, manage, and report on climate change-related risk, and the circumstances in which they may be liable for failing to do so.

The principal focus of EODG is the retrieval of atmospheric properties (e.g. temperature, pressure, trace gas concentrations, aerosol and cloud properties) from data gathered by Earth Observing satellites.

Our research aims to understand how contemporary ecosystems function, and how they are affected by global atmospheric change and anthropogenic activity.

Energy security and climate change are among the biggest challenges facing us today. We are working with both academic and industrial partners on projects looking for ICT based solutions to some of these problems.

We research sustainable energy systems which accelerate universal access and a net-zero future.

The University of Oxford, alongside University College London (UCL), is to lead on an £8.7m research project to establish an Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory (EDOL) in the UK. The five-year programme will establish a national energy data platform to help facilitate the transition to net-zero carbon emissions.

The Environmental Fluid Mechanics group carries out research across a range of different topics and disciplines. The focus of the group is on fundamental research into the fluids mechanics of a range of engineering problems. The group uses a range of numerical, experimental and analytical methods. Research areas include: Tidal Energy, Ocean Waves and Wind Energy

The Environmental Proxies In Karst group, led by Dr Chris Day, develops and applies proxies for understanding environmental processes in the top few tens of meters of the Earth's surface. 

Our research into exoplanet atmospheres spans two sub-departments in Physics, Astrophysics and AOPP, and the Earth Sciences department, and we collaborate under the umbrella of the Oxford Network for Planets.

To use an integrated food systems approach and innovative methods and tools to help a wide range of stakeholders develop and implement enhanced food system policy and practice. Research is aimed at delivering outcomes better balanced across food security, livelihoods and enterprise, and environmental goals.

Our research focuses explicitly on creating solutions, including policy influence on cooling energy demand and social aspects of climate mitigation, the design and implementation of alternative supply chains, enhancing the uptake of the best-in-class refrigerant gases as well as evidence-based guidelines to better handle the healthcare burden of severe heat.

The Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food is an interdisciplinary programme of research and policy engagement concerning all aspects of the food system, based at the University of Oxford.

Fluid dynamics underpins our understanding of a huge number of phenomena in geophysics and astrophysics, ranging from small, dusty vortices generated by the wind in your garden up to convection in the interiors and atmospheres of stars and planets or the self-gravitating motions of giant clouds of gas and dust that permeate the galaxy from which stars are borne.

The Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation (GCHU) seeks to make urban centres environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable, and to provide an environment that supports and sustains health and wellbeing.

We provide free and methodologically harmonised data on the production practices and environmental impacts of farms and food products. Our calculation tools and data format enable farms and supply chains to quantify, communicate, and reduce their impacts.

Our research group develops computational approaches to detect, attribute, and predict how changes in climate and land cover may affect water and weather extremes over sub-daily to multi-decadal timescales (in the past and future). Our work primarily covers floods, droughts, extreme heat, and heavy rainfall, but also groundwater, soil moisture, wildfires, tropical cyclones, atmospheric rivers, reservoirs, and river dynamics.

The Ice and Fluid Dynamics research group focuses on improving understanding of fluid dynamical processes that contribute to controlling the climate state, with a particular emphasis on interactions between the cryosphere and ocean circulation.

The goal of INET Oxford's work on sustainability is to develop insights that can help lead us to a new economic model that enables humankind to prosper within the "safe operating space" of our planet's physical and ecological systems.

Intelligent Earth brings together academics from key environmental science and AI departments across Oxford with non-academic partners to train a new generation of DPhil students to tackle some of the most pressing environmental issues using AI through five closely connected themes.

The key themes are Climate, Biodiversity, Natural Hazards, Environmental Solutions and Core AI research.

Our research has a broad focus. We are interested in what drives natural climate change; in the history of ocean circulation; in understanding geochemical cycles including that of carbon; and in anything else that isotopes can help us to study in the natural world. Much of this research assesses the behaviour of parts of this system expected to change during future climate change.

A core aim of our research is to better understand how governance systems organise and distribute decision-making authority across conflicting interests, from the local to global scale, and the impacts of such systems on forests and people.

This research cluster focuses on landscape processes, long-term landscape dynamics, dryland environments and human-landscape interactions. 

The LEAP programme aims to understand the health, environmental, social and economic effects of meat and dairy production and consumption to provide evidence and tools for decision makers to promote healthy and sustainable diets.

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, based at the University of Oxford will tackle the challenge of halting and reversing this loss of biodiversity by addressing the ecological, social, cultural and economic dimensions of nature recovery in a single framework, harnessing state-of-the-art technologies and thereby developing and testing an innovative model to deliver nature recovery at scale.

We collect and analyse data spanning a wide range of temporal and spatial scales to understand the processes that underpin diversity, distribution and abundance of plants and animals across global landscapes in space and time.

The Nature-based Solutions Initiative is an interdisciplinary programme of research, education and policy advice based at the University of Oxford. Its mission is to enhance understanding of the potential of Nature-based Solutions to address multiple global challenges and support their sustainable implementation worldwide.

The Net Zero Regulation and Policy Hub aims to meet the enormous ‘implementation gap' between the net zero targets that governments and companies have set, and the policies and actions needed to deliver them.

OceanBug is the Oxford group based in the Earth Sciences department researching marine biogeochemistry. Our research interests span from developing inventive ways to reconstruct oceans of the past, to understanding the adaptation of organisms to changing ocean chemistry in the modern perturbed world – all with ocean bugs at their heart! 

Life-writing includes every possible way of telling a life-story, from biography and autobiography, through letters and memoir, to bio-fiction, blogs, and social media such as Tweets and Instagram stories. Writers and researchers are increasingly recognizing how much of writing is life-writing, including poetry and fiction. Through life-writing we can find out more about each other and we also understand ourselves better in relation to the past. 

The Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) works with a global community of reporters and editors across platforms and beats to improve the quality, understanding and impact of climate coverage around the world. The OCJN is a programme at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

Oxford Net Zero is an interdisciplinary research initiative based in the University of Oxford's fifteen years of research on climate neutrality, working to track progress, align standards and inform effective solutions in climate science, law, policy, economics, clean energy, transport, land and food systems and greenhouse gas removal and storage.

The Global Recovery Observatory brings transparency to global government spending during the COVID-19 crisis. The intent of the Observatory is to showcase exemplary policy solutions, identify lost opportunities. and direct governments towards more impactful and sustainable investment. The full database is updated regularly and can be downloaded here.

The Physical Oceanography group uses analytical theory, numerical models and ocean observations to understand the circulation of the oceans and their role in the climate system. It includes scientists in both the Earth Sciences Department and in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics.

The Planetary Climate Dynamics Research Group carries out research on all aspects of planetary atmospheres and planetary interiors that govern the evolution of planetary climate over time.

Our research combines artificial intelligence technology and international real-world data from a range of real-world health and environmental sources, aiming to improve our data-driven understanding of chronic and communicable diseases, monitor the impact of changes to the climate and environment, and address sources of health inequality across the globe. 

Predictions of weather and climate are inherently uncertain: initial conditions can never be known perfectly, and our weather and climate simulators are necessarily imperfect representations of the underlying laws of physics. 

The research of the group focuses on the analysis of resource-rich economies rich in natural resources and on problems associated with natural capital, global warming and environmental economics, with special emphasis on measuring the impact of natural resources and environmental policy and on public finance, mechanism design trade, decision under uncertainty and macro development issues.

This is an ESRC-DFID funded pilot project, contributing to research on low carbon transitions. It develops a set of micro-level methods that can be usefully applied elsewhere, including in advanced economies. Informal economies, however, have been completely neglected in the debates about climate change and the long awaited materials revolution.

Stratigraphy and sedimentology are fundamental to our understanding of Earth history because sedimentary strata form the principal archive of past events, climates and environments. Research in Oxford covers broad aspects of stratigraphy and sedimentology, but in particular focuses on integration of data from a range of biological, physical and geochemical sources.

Established in 2012 we work to align finance with sustainability. The centre is multidisciplinary and works globally across asset classes, finance professions, and with different parts of the financial system.

The Oxford Sustainable Law Programme (SLP), launched in 2021, is a rapidly-growing, world-leading hub for research, education, and engagement at the intersection of law and sustainability. We see the law as a tool to catalyse the sustainability transition. Our work is multidisciplinary and informed by practice. 

Research on Sustainable Urban Development (SUD) at Oxford seeks to develop advanced knowledge on the challenges and opportunities for developing more sustainable and just urban spaces, communities and politics. The SUD research programme takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of sustainable urbanism drawing on a full spectrum of research methodologies and philosophies.

TABLE is a global platform for knowledge synthesis, for reflective, critical thinking and for inclusive dialogue on debates about the future of food.

The FoaLab is a group of researchers and students working together to elucidate geophysical processes involving fluid mechanics and phase changes. Our research interests include magma/mantle dynamics at plate-tectonic boundaries, the coupled dynamics of ice sheets and subglacial hydrology, and other problems in involving melting, freezing, and fluid flow

The TSU's research has shown that technological fixes such as electric vehicles will not solve the climate emissions conundrum on their own; more deep and meaningful change is required to the ways in which we live and move.

Oxford is a leading centre for research in volcanology. We work closely with colleagues in areas as diverse as atmospheric physics, archaeology, biomedical engineering, ecosystem science, environmental microbiology, oceanography and paleomagnetism.

The project is the first of its kind and answers the question: whether and to what extent does anthropogenic climate change alter the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather events? It does this around the world in real-time, while the event is still unfolding.

Young Lives is a unique longitudinal study of poverty and inequality that has been following the lives of 12,000 children in Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam since 2001.

The ZERO (Zero-carbon Energy Research Oxford) Institute brings together researchers from across the University of Oxford to tackle questions surrounding zero-carbon energy systems, elevating Oxford as a centre of research excellence and leadership on the zero-carbon transition. 

The Machine Learning Research Group (MLRG) sits within Information Engineering in the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford. We are one of the core groupings that make up the wider community of Oxford Machine Learning & AI (Artificial Intelligence).