Environment and society

Our MSc Environment, Culture and Society provides up-to-date knowledge of the contemporary issues and debates on the relationships between the environment, nature, culture and society.

Welcoming students from a variety of backgrounds, this exciting MSc will explore the core perspectives, concepts, and practices from the arts, humanities and social sciences needed to imagine and enact sustainable environmental futures.

This MSc will equip you to think critically across disciplinary divides, generate new knowledge related to the environment and use this knowledge to address urgent environmental challenges.

Are you ready to explore some of the world's most pressing challenges?

Understand the link between the environment, development agendas, and justice issues for today and the future.

Our MSc Environment and Development enables you to critically evaluate the inter-relationships between development and the environment, with an abiding concern for social and environmental justice.

You will learn about issues that are inherently transboundary, multi-generational and multi-faceted. Our approach to understanding these issues will centre on questions of justice and inequalities.

Our world faces significant and complex challenges, from rising inequality to environmental issues. Global climate change is now affecting everyone on the planet.

Ensuring environmental sustainability and achieving it is one of the most significant challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.

• What are the debates and challenges surrounding different models of sustainable development?
• How can economic and energy systems be restructured to combat climate change?
• What policies foster sustainability, and what are the challenges and implications of implementing these in the ‘Global South’ and the ‘Global North’?

At this critical moment, more organisations are working to promote sustainable development, reduce human impacts on the environment, and achieve economic equity. These initiatives include the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

With the MSc Environmental Sustainability, you can explore these questions and other significant challenges affecting our world today and in the future.

Our MSc in Energy, Society and Sustainability equips you with an understanding of how different societies can address the challenge of balancing energy with sustainability. It brings together a social, political, economic, and environmental understanding of low-carbon technologies.

You will explore the risks, costs, and benefits of transitioning to low-carbon energy in a globalised world by asking the following questions:

• How do we achieve energy security, energy justice, and environmental sustainability across different contexts, timescales, places and people?
• How are societies affected by the energy transition? And how do people, policy, and society enable or hinder it?

Our programme will equip you with a critical awareness of related local, regional and global debates and challenges, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the role of energy in development, facilitating the exploration of the above challenges affecting our world today and in the future.

Rapid climate change and the global expansion of human activities threaten the world's oceans.

How do we realistically balance development with ocean conservation in a rapidly changing climate? And how do we do this in ways that are also equitable and fair to society?

Our MSc places you right at the forefront of the fast-paced interface between marine science and policy that deals with these sustainability challenges. As a student, the programme centres a lot with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water but our programme’s interdisciplinarity will help you find links to all SDGs.

This broad programme is built around the science and policies spanning tropical to polar ecosystems, from wetlands and estuaries to the deep-sea including the abyss.

You can learn how to apply marine science and knowledge to critically evaluate and enrich policies and influence how new policies can be created through science communication.