School of Earth and Environment

Environmental change and sustainable development

Men at camel market, Eritrea

Environmental change and sustainable development research at SRI explores a wide range of issues with relevance to both the Global North and South. These include the development of new integrated approaches for research in thematic areas including:

  • agricultural development and livelihoods
  • land use change and land degradation
  • climate change vulnerability and resilience
  • conservation and protected areas
  • market access and the agri-food trade
  • resource management and development
  • the role of the private sector as a development agent, and
  • equity, power relations and accountability in sustainable development.

Our strengths lie in developing novel interdisciplinary approaches that enable research to have direct impacts on development practice and decision-making.

We have led and conducted several large, interdisciplinary projects in a variety of regional, national and subnational contexts. These include the Multi-Level Governance of Natural Resources (GoverNat) project in the EU, Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation funded projects based in Africa entitled 'Managing land for carbon in southern Africa: Relationships between carbon, livelihoods and ecosystem services', 'Sustainable delivery of pollination services for African food production' and 'Food and Ecosystem Services in Eastern Africa', the UK-based Sustainable Uplands RELU project, the Desertification Mitigation & Remediation of Land (DESIRE) project, which works in 18 land degradation hotspots across the world, and the Governance Implications of Private Standards Initiatives in Agri-Food Chains project in Kenya. Work is also ongoing at the interface of environment and human health through an IDRC funded Ecohealth project, on networks of global conservation governance funded by the Leverhulme Trust, and sustainability and biofuel development funded by the EU. Through our research we have established national, global and regional partnerships with a range of stakeholders including universities, private sector companies, government ministries, UN secretariats and agencies, NGOs and civil society groups, ensuring maximum value and impact through our integrated research programmes.