The Environmental Change Institute at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

was founded in 1991 "to organize and promote interdisciplinary research on the nature, causes and impact of environmental change and to contribute to the development of management strategies for coping with future environmental change". In 2013/14 it had a research income of £4.7million, 50 active projects, 350 partners and 60 researchers working across 40 countries. The ECI's research is interdisciplinary in both outlook and approach. The Institute has worked on aspects of climate, energy and ecosystems and is developing expertise with food and water. ECI is involved in several long-term research projects, including th
UK Climate Impacts Programme
(UKCIP) which develops new tools to link climate science with business and government for innovations that can adaptat to the impacts of climate change and

Climateprediction.net climate''prediction''.net (CPDN) is a volunteer computing project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. It aims to do this by running hundreds of thousands of different models (a large climate ensemble) using the donated ...

, the world's largest citizen science climate project with 350,000 individuals running climate simulations in order to better understand regional climate patterns. Staff of the institute have led EU consortium programmes including Impressions, studying the impacts and risks of extreme climate change; and co-ordinated GEM, a global ecological monitoring programme across remote forest locations in South America, Africa and Asia. The ECI also runs an MSc in Environmental Change and Management (ECM). The Institute was led by Professor Jim Hall from 2011 until September 2018. He was replaced by Friederike Otto who is currently acting Director.

Research

The ECI's research is organised around five main themes in climate, ecosystems, energy, food and water. There are expert teams in:
Biodiversity and climate adaptation

Climate impacts and adaptation

Ecosystem dynamics and

ecosystem services Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems. Th ...

Energy demand management

Extreme climate event attribution

Food security

Sustainable infrastructure systems

Tropical forests and carbon dynamics

Water security

References

1991 establishments in England Organizations established in 1987 Research institutes of the University of Oxford Research institutes in Oxford Environmental organisations based in England Environmental research institutes {{Oxfordshire-struct-stub