Research

Our research

Oxford University provides leadership in interdisciplinary climate research to respond to society’s most pressing knowledge gaps and policy challenges at all scales.

Research activities connect climate risk and global environmental change to technological and institutional innovations to promote security for people, ecosystems and economic growth. Research themes span multiple disciplines from engineering and earth science to policy, politics, economics and geography. In partnership with UK and international research agencies, governments and business, Oxford delivers research excellence and impact.

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Recent Publications

Groups

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.

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Overview

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

PDF last updated July 2021.

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Article Collection

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.

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Energy Demand Observatory and Laboratory

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.

Environmental Proxies in Karst (EPIK)

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.

Exoplanet Atmospheres

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.

Food Systems

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.

Future of Cooling

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.

Future of Food

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.

Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics

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.

Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation (GCHU)

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.

Ice and Fluid 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.

Intelligent Earth

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.

Isotopes and Climate

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.

Land, Society and Governance

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.

Landscape Dynamics

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

LEAP: Livestock, Environment, and People

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.

Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery

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.

Long-Term Ecology

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.