The Natural Resources Institute, as part of the University of Greenwich, is pleased to be able to offer PhD supervision on Climate, Environment and Development, as part of the International Development Pathway of the UBEL Doctoral Training Partnership. We are joined in this by selected staff from the Greenwich Business School. This document introduces the training route and our capacity to supervise within it. Potential applicants need to apply through the UBEL website and should read carefully the guidance given there.
Please Note: Some NRI staff are also available to supervise within the Intersectional Gender Inequalities route as part of the Gender and Sexuality Pathway. For further information on this please contact Professor Tracey Reynolds (
Research into relations between development in the Global South and environmental trends (for which consumption patterns in the Global North are largely responsible), including climate change, biodiversity loss, and deforestation, has long formed an important strand of our research work within development studies, strengthened in 2020-21 by several new appointments. To our longstanding research focus on vulnerability, resilience, inequalities and adaptation among the rural poor, including the role of local and national institutions, we have added new research areas, such as the qualitative and quantitative understanding of the climate-conflict-food security nexus, issues around biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, and relationality, political ecology and transformative change. Colleagues from the Greenwich Business School bring additional expertise, for example in ecological macroeconomics, climate finance, the green economy, and quantitative methods. We have capacity to provide doctoral supervision on all these topics.
NRI’s research initiatives in these areas are coordinated by the Climate Change Research Group and the Political Ecology, Arts & Culture Research Group, within a broader Centre for Society, Environment and Development. NRI researchers have recently published in journals including: World Development, Nature Food, Journal of Agricultural Economics, Global Environmental Change, Climate and Development, Environmental Development, Food Security, Heliyon, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and Sustainable Production and Consumption. A key indicator of the excellence and impact of NRI research is the engagement of several NRI staff in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), notably John Morton who served as Coordinating Lead Author on Rural Areas for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report and Valerie Nelson who is serving as Lead Author on the current IPBES Transformative Change Thematic Assessment and on the UN Environment Programme GEO 7 State of the Environment Report. For further details see IPBES and IPCC awarded the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity
NRI has 15 current PhD students working on social science topics related to climate and environment. These students benefit from the wider facilities and opportunities enjoyed by NRI’s 50+ PhD student cohort, including a flourishing NRI Postgraduate Society (NRIPS).
We have a large pool of potential supervisors. Some of these, especially Morton, Martin, Islam, Onaran, Wellard, Shee and Lamboll are experienced supervisors having supervised multiple PhDs to completion. Others listed may be newer to PhD supervision, but have highly relevant research experience and interests. Under University of Greenwich regulations, each research student is supervised by a team of three supervisors, so more experienced staff may act as co-supervisors. Further details of potential supervisors are given below, please follow the links to their webpages for a fuller account of their research interests.
For discussion on proposed projects for a UBEL application, please contact at most two of the named supervisors below, following the guidance on the UBEL website. For more general queries, please contact Professor John Morton: