Prof. Robert Nicholls
Prof. Robert Nicholls is the Lead PI for the consortium. His research concerns long-term coastal engineering and management, especially the issues of coastal impacts and adaptation to climate change, with an emphasis on sea-level rise.
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Dr. Craig Hutton
Dr. Craig Hutton is the Deputy PI for the DECCMA Project. His research, applied research & consultancy focus lies at the intersection between the environment and social implications of environmental/climate change and management for sustainable development.
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Jon Lawn
Jon Lawn is the Consortium Coordinator for the Deltas Vulnerability and Climate Change; Migration and Adaptation (DECCMA) research project. He graduated from the University of Southampton with a BSc in Geography in 2003. Since then he has undertaken management roles in retail, catering, office and charity sectors. Jon joined the staff at the University of Southampton in 2011 and has coordinated the NERC funded iCOASST project and Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation funded ESPA Deltas Project. He has interests in environmental and poverty issues and has previously volunteered in wildlife conservation in South Africa and charities that work with the poor in the UK.
Dr. Emma Tompkins
Dr. Emma Tompkins is a Reader in Environment and Development. She has worked on climate change adaptation since 2001, specifically barriers and limits to institutional adaptation, public-private partnerships for adaptation, and drivers of individual action and national policy on adaptation. She has published numerous papers, articles and policy briefs on environmental management, adaptation to climate change, and social and ecological resilience as well as handbooks on surviving climate change in small islands and participatory coastal zone management. She has a PhD Environmental Science (UEA), MSc Environmental and Resource Economics (UCL) and BA Economics (Leicester).
Dr. Natalie Suckall
Dr. Natalie Suckall is an environmental-social scientist with an interest in understanding how rural and urban communities respond to climate change. Before joining DECCMA, Natalie examined the trade-offs and synergies between autonomous adaptation, mitigation and development in subsistence communities in Zanzibar. Prior to this, Natalie’s PhD (University of Leeds) investigated the effect of climate change on rural-urban migration patterns in Malawi. Natalie is acting co-lead for DECCMA’s work package 6, which will identify and evaluate feasible and acceptable planned and autonomous adaptations in the three deltas. Natalie is also DECCMA’s Theory of Change lead.
Dr. Chris Hill
Dr. Chris Hill is a graduate of Exeter University (BSc Combined Honours, Biology and Geography). He is Director of the GeoData Institute, a university based enterprise agency, where he directs its geospatial, spatial data infrastructure, remote sensing and environmental data management programmes.
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Dr. Fiifi Amoako Johnson
Dr. Fiifi Amoako Johnson is a lecturer in Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton with expertise in geospatial analysis, small area estimation, complex survey modelling and demographic analysis. His research primarily focuses on healthcare inequalities, climate change, environmental disaster impact and socioeconomic impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
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Prof. Steve Darby
S.E.Darby@soton.ac.uk
Prof. Stephen Darby is Professor of Physical Geography in Geography and Environment and Head of the Academic Unit. He has worked at Southampton since 1997. He served as the Vice Chair (Research) of the British Society for Geomorphology (2012-2015) and is currently the Junior Deputy Chair of that society. Prof. Darby will be working on Work Package 2 for the DECCMA project.
Prof. John Dearing
Prof. John Dearing’s research career has been mainly in palaeoenvironmental change. He now focuses on the nature of recent social-ecological dynamics, such as trends and thresholds, using lake sediments and other records to reconstruct changes in ecosystem services. He is working with PhD students to apply these methods to understand the vulnerability of DECCMA delta systems.
Prof. Sabu Padmadas
Sabu Padmadas is Professor of Demography and Global Health, and co-Director of the Centre for Global Health, Population, Poverty and Policy at Southampton. His research focuses on the application of demographic and statistical methods to global health and population dynamics in low-middle and transition economies, impact evaluation and population projections.
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Dr. Attila Lazar
Dr. Attila Lazar is a post-doctoral Research Fellow, trained mechanical engineer (BEng), environmental scientist (MSc) and riverine and wetland modeller (PhD, post-doc). He is employed on the ESPA Deltas project which aims to provide the Bangladeshi policy makers with the knowledge and tools to evaluate the effects of policy decisions on people’s livelihoods within the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta, linking changes in the bio-physical environment to livelihoods, poverty and health. Attila is an integrative modeller who designs, implements and tests the model framework, and applies it to study sites to answer policy questions. Within the DECCMA project, Attila is part of the Work Package 5 (Integration Modelling) team.
Dr Abiy S Kebede
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Dr. Abiy S. Kebede is a Research Fellow in Integrated Modelling within the Engineering and the Environment Faculty at the University of Southampton and is also part of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Abiy has a background in Civil Engineering (BSc), with multiple Master’s degrees in Coastal and Marine Engineering and Management (CoMEM) from three European universities: University of Southampton (UK), Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands), and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway).
Frances Dunn
Frances Dunn is a postdoctoral researcher and is currently finishing her PhD. Her thesis is focused on modelling multidecadal fluvial sediment fluxes to deltas under future environmental changes. Her background is in physical geography, with a BSc in Geography and an MSc in Environmental Modelling, Monitoring, and Reconstruction from the University of Manchester. Frances is working on Work Package 2 on subsidence and physical adaptation mapping, as well as aiding the delta portal setup and timeline administration.
Gregory Cooper
Gregory Cooper is a first year PhD student at the University of Southampton, studying ‘Socio-ecological tipping points in world deltas’; likely focusing on the Mahanadi and GBM or Volta. He graduated with a first-class degree in Geography in 2014 and his research interests include complex social-ecological systems, environmental change and critical transitions. Gregory’s PhD concentrates on observing/modelling the past and future sustainability of key deltaic socio-ecological functions (e.g. regulating and provision services), with specific reference to tipping point transitions. Saliently, this work assesses the sudden and widespread losses of ecosystem services, livelihoods and the associated sustainability of deltaic populations in the face of growing social and natural stresses in a changing world.
Sarah Jane Spinney
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Sarah Spinney has degrees in BSc Geography and MSc Climate Change and Risk Management, both from the University of Exeter and commenced her PhD at the University of Southampton 2014. She has an interest in how shifting climate regimes will present new risks to society and how the resilience of exposed populations can be increased; particularly in coastal and fluvial systems. Sarah’s PhD study aims to provide projections of morphological change in deltaic systems under a range of climatic and environmental change scenarios.
Tristan Berchoux
Tristan Berchoux holds a BSc in Environmental Sciences and a MSc in Agricultural Economics, and has previously worked in different international development programmes. Tristan’s research focuses on the spatio-temporal associations between livelihoods and natural hazards. It contributes to DECCMA through different outputs: land cover mapping, characterisation of livelihoods, impact of natural hazards and data gathering.
Giorgia Prati
Giorgia Prati is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Southampton where she is looking at the implications of migration on women’s adaptive capacity in the Mahanadi delta. She holds an MSc in Climate Change and Development and her previous collaborations include CARE international, Mercy Corps and EuropeAid.
Margherita Fanchiotti
Margherita Fanciotti is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Southampton, where she is looking at tropical cyclone resilience of coastal communities in the Mahanadi delta. She is a civil engineer specialised in flood risk management and her previous collaborations include UNESCO and the World Resources Institute.
Amy Welch
Amy Welch holds a BSc in Oceans, Climate and Physical Geography and an MSc(Eng) in Civil and Environmental Engineering, both of which were obtained from the University of Liverpool. Her PhD study aims to focus on the development and sustainability of various engineered systems that have been utilised within the four deltas. She will also consider how these systems can be effectively characterised and simulated in coupled integrated models of deltas and coastal zones in general.
Kashif Majeed Salik
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Kashif Salik is a PRISE Senior Research Associate from the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad. He joined the DECCMA team at the University of Southampton to complete his PhD, which aims to explore climate-induced components of migration patterns and associated vulnerabilities and risks on livelihoods/food security and urbanisation through the analysis of socio-economic parameters.
Previous members
Sophie Day
Dr Sophie Day has over a decade of environmental social science research experience in both academia and consultancy. Her expertise lies around the interplay between the social, policy and technical challenges facing long-term adaptation to climate change – particularly in complex coastal contexts at local to international scales. Sophie is working to produce deliverables for Work Task 6.3, “Theorise interactions between autonomous household adaptation and planned adaptationâ€, for the ‘Adaptation’ Work Package 6.
Carolin Bothe-Tews
Carolin Bothe-Tews is the “Research into Use” Co-ordinator for DECCMA. She holds a Diploma in Geography from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has almost 20 years of experience in communication and knowledge management, mainly in the field of development co-operation.
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Dr Sally Brown
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Dr Sally Brown has a background in geomorphology, coastal engineering and climate change adaptation. Sally has a BSc in Geophysical Sciences, MRes in Coastal Engineering for Climate Change, and a PhD in Coastal Engineering. She has joined DECCMA at the University of Southampton to analyse what the impacts of 1.5°C mean for delta regions, focusing on implications of sea-level rise, following the global temperature goals agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement.