From climate change to inequality - working on the world's biggest problems today

Welcome to the School of Geography and Environment, a vibrant community of agenda-setting researchers, teachers, students and professional services staff.

We are one of the foremost geography and environment university departments in the world, internationally recognised for the quality of our research and our teaching. Geography at the University of Oxford is a large, vibrant and intellectually diverse community comprising the core academic department of the School of Geography and the Environment, its three research centres: the Environmental Change Institute (ECI), the Transport Studies Unit (TSU) and the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment (SSEE) and several geographers based elsewhere in the wider university.

We craft robust, imaginative and forward-looking answers to pressing questions about the environment, technology, geopolitics and socio-economic change.

This subject is the intersection of everything. So many disciplines and pressing issues come together in one place.

DPhil student, 2022
Image: cabuscaa / Adobe Stock
IN THE MEDIA

A mighty river is flowing out of the Amazon rainforest, and it’s not the one you’re thinking of. In the first kilometre above the forest canopy, a “flying river” is transporting moisture evaporated from Amazonian trees southwards along the Andes mountains towards Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state in Brazil. Almost the entire state - an area larger than the UK - is currently affected by unprecedented floods. The flying river has acted like a firehose, fuelling five months of rainfall in just two weeks, further enhanced by a strong jetstream located in just the wrong position above the region. In an article for The Conversation, Dr Marcia Zilli, Dr Neil Hart, and colleague Dr Caio Coelho, explore why - based on future projections of climate change - this situation will likely get worse as the temperature rises.