Climate Change, Environmental Risk and Resilience
This work involves the modelling of climate-, hydrological-, health- and fire-related risk and the exploration of risk mitigation policies, politics of resilience, disaster recovery and resettlement, local risk management and decision-making responses.
Image: A river flowing through a lead-mine spoil heap, polluting the landscape. Photograph by Dr Matthew Johnson.
Environmental risk, reconstruction and climate change
A key focus of this research is on understanding, reconstructing and modelling climate change-related impacts. Particular emphasis is placed on the impacts of climate change on humans, fire activity, catchment-scale hydrology, water resources and ecosystems including the impacts of extreme conditions on human and ecosystem health.
Recent publications
- Alam, G.M.M., Alam, K., Mushtaq, S. and Clarke, M.L. 2017. Vulnerability to climate change in riparian char and river-bank households in Bangladesh: implication for policy, livelihoods and social development. Ecological Indicators. 72, 23-32
- Fraser, A. 2017. The Missing Politics of Urban Vulnerability: The State and the Co-production of Climate Risk. Environment and Planning A. 49, 2835-2852.
- Mariani, M., Fletcher, M.S., Haberle, S., Chin, H., Zawadzki, A. and Jacobsen, G. 2019. Climate change reduces resilience to fire in subalpine rainforests. Global change biology. 25, 2030-2042.
- Schewe, J., Gosling, S.N. et al. 2019 State-of-the-art global models underestimate impacts from climate extremes. Nature Communications 10: 1005.
Disaster recovery and risk resilience
This area of research focuses on the politics of disaster recovery, urban resilience and local risk management responses in the global South and includes the development of modelling and decision-making processes for managing responses to climate change.
Recent publications
- Collodi, J., Pelling, M., Fraser, A. Borie, M. and Di Vicenz, S. 2019. How do you Build Back Better so no one is left behind? Lessons from St Maarten, Dutch Caribbean, post-Hurricane Irma. Disasters.
- Fraser, A. 2017. The Missing Politics of Urban Vulnerability: The State and the Co-production of Climate Risk. Environment and Planning A. 49, 2835-2852.
- Fraser, A.. 2018. Informality in the New Urban Agenda: From the Aspirational Policies of Inclusion to the Politics of Constructive Engagement. Planning Theory and Practice. 19, 124-126.
Water management
This research focuses on the vulnerability of rivers and catchments to environmental change and anthropogenic pressure including the potential impact of climate change on rising river water temperatures as well as global- and catchment-scale hydrology. Another area of interest is pollution in freshwaters, including the presence of plastics in rivers, and the impact of metals, agrochemicals, nutrients and fine sediment on invertebrate organisms and the development of biomonitoring techniques.
Recent publications
- Gosling, S.N. and Arnell, N.W. 2016. A global assessment of the impact of climate change on water scarcity. Climatic Change. 134, 371-385
- Johnson, M. Thorne, C. Castro, J. Kondolf, G.M. Celeste, M. Rood, S. and Westbrook, C. 2019. Biomic river restoration: A new focus for river management. River Research and Applications. 36, 3-12.
- Stanton, T. Johnson, M. Nathanail, P. Macnaughtan, W. and Gomes, R. 2019. Freshwater and airborne textile fibre populations are dominated by ‘natural’, not microplastic, fibres. Science of the Total Environment. 666, 377-389.
- Veldkamp, T.I.E. Wada, Y. Aerts, J.C.J.H. Döll, P, Gosling, S.N. Liu, J. Masaki, Y. Oki, T. Ostberg, S. Pokhrel, Y. Satoh, Y. Kim, H. and Ward, P.J. 2017. Water scarcity hotspots travel downstream due to human interventions in the 20th and 21st century. Nature Communications. 8, 15697