Climate Change MSc

University of East Anglia

Overview

Develop your scientific skills and knowledge and learn about the natural science and societal issues underpinning climate change, through an MSc that’s never been more essential. Climate change resulting from human activity will present us with demanding challenges over the coming decades, and an interdisciplinary approach is necessary to understand these challenges.

This MSc in Climate Change is designed to provide you with in-depth interdisciplinary knowledge of climate change science, society and policy. You’ll have the freedom to direct your studies depending on your interests and career destination.

As a graduate of this course, you’ll have strong employability potential in many careers including academic research, business consultancies, industry, policy-making, or government research agencies, in areas from climate change impacts and adaptation to net zero and sustainability.

About This Course

Based within the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV), this course will give you an authoritative understanding of climate change – including recent climate history, present-day variations and climate prediction. Many lecturers on the course are part of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), widely recognised as one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change, and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, who provide evidence to inform society’s transition to a sustainable low-carbon and climate-resilient future.

Through different modules, you’ll discover the fundamentals of the changing climate, including the Earth’s energy balance, the global circulation of the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect, and the causes of climate change and variability. You'll study the evidence and causes of climate change over the last two millennia up to the present day, including the atmospheric build-up of greenhouse gases and its consequences for the behaviour of the Earth system.

You’ll study climate model projections of the future, from temperature and sea-level changes on global scales, to extreme events such as drought. You will also learn about research methods, data preparation and analysis, how we detect anthropogenic changes to the climate, and theoretical or model-based approaches to climate prediction.

You’ll also consider climate change from the viewpoint of energy generation and usage. You'll learn about the key relationships between energy, fossil fuels and the economy, by drawing on historical analyses to understand how energy systems have evolved in the past and examine the role that scenarios play in exploring energy futures. You’ll gain an in-depth understanding of the complexities of changing energy systems, enabling you to critically engage with debates around future “energy transitions”, the role that innovation and emergent technologies might play, and the various challenges of shifting towards renewable based energy systems.

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