Oxford’s MSc in Environmental Change and Management is now in its fifth year, and receiving an average of 230 applications from throughout the world, for the 30 places on the course. The intake is international - for the last two years we have achieved a student mix covering fourteen or more countries, from all five continents, and with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds, from Economics to Ecology, Law to Latin American Studies.
The course was seen as an inspirational model by a NATO workshop on Teaching Global Science for the way in which so many disciplines from around the University are involved. In this respect the course reflects the Environmental Change Institute's (ECI) remit to act as a catalyst for cross-departmental initiatives in environmental teaching and research. The ECI is a relatively new - and growing - research Unit with some 30 researchers involved in interdisciplinary and collaborative research on the nature, causes, and impacts of environmental change, and to the development of strategies for dealing with future changes.
A distinctive - and probably unique - feature of this course is its focus on how present and future changes in the local and global environment may be managed. Other environmental change graduate courses tend to concentrate on the past, on limited aspects of the present such as conservation, landscape ecology, or are exclusively method-based (eg Geographic Information Systems, Environmental Impact Assessment).
The ECI’s MSc takes a broad view and balances a strong conceptual approach with coverage of relevant methods. The complexity of modern environmental problems requires students to cover a wide range of topics including current issues and their driving forces, methods for environmental management, and the response of society to environmental change, including law, ethics, economics, and policy.
The course is based upon three central elements:
• Issues and Driving Forces, including issues of global and national concern, and driving forces such as population, energy, and land use change;
• Managing the Environment, concerned with the legal, economic and ethical underpinning of environmental management and decision making, and a consideration of policy and management strategies at a variety of scales from the global to the local;
• Methods and Techniques for Environmental Management, including laboratory and field-based work - computing, modelling and survey techniques, Geographic Information Systems, environmental assessment, and remote sensing.
Students specialise in two option courses, for example in transport, energy, food security, environmental law, biodiversity, environmental economics, and also undertake individual research leading to a 15,000 word dissertation at the end of the course. Students are able to seek supervisors from across the University, or indeed beyond, to facilitate research into a wide range of topics, developing personal interests and specialisms.
For a full list of the course options click here. To download the detailed information on the options in booklet form click here (this is a zipped Word file).
A particular feature of the course is the teaching input from several departments including Educational Studies, Geography, Management, Plant Sciences, Socio-Legal Studies, Transport Studies, and Zoology. It is our aim that students should benefit from the immense depth and breadth of expertise that Oxford has to offer in teaching on the environment.
Application forms for the course, along with full details of the application procedure to Oxford can be obtained from graduate.admissions@admin.ox.ac.uk. The closing date for applications is 1 March each year. Applicants are advised to apply early to avoid disappointment.
For further details please contact:
Environmental Change Institute
University of Oxford
5 South Parks Road
OXFORD
OX1 3UB
UK
Tel: +1865 281180
Fax: +1865 281202