Geography Taught Masters

MA Environmental Hazards & Risk

Our postgraduate courses share an interdisciplinary foundation in risk and vulnerability. Our different degree programmes deepen students’ understanding of the risks emerging from anthropogenic climate change, hazards and political responses to disruption.

Our MA in Environmental Hazards and Risk takes a detailed look at a range of environmental hazards bringing devastation to many parts of the world, analysing the impact on society and studying how risks linked to events such as flooding, landslides, heatwaves and earthquakes, are managed.

Teaching physical and social science approaches, the course examines how society, as individuals, organisations and governments, makes decisions about defining and mitigating against environmental risk in order to address vulnerability and build resilience.

MA Course Structure

This pathway provides specialised scientific training in environmental hazards. Students will receive theoretical and practical training for understanding, quantifying and/or critically evaluating environmental hazards and the relationship of these with issues of vulnerability and resilience.

You will learn about how environmental hazards and risks persist over long periods of time instead of merely as single events, and are made up of both natural processes as well as socio-economic dynamics. The pathway is available for both MA and MSc students. Its main modules are ‘Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Hazards’ and ‘Hydro-meteorological Hazards’.

• EITHER Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Hazards
• OR Hydro-meteorological Hazards

PLUS:

• Understanding Risk
• Risk Frontiers
• Research or Vocational Dissertation Project
• Research Methods for Global Challenges
• Social Dimensions of Risk & Resilience

What our students say: Rebecca Tyrrell, MA in Risk

Be social. Be informed. Be a part of Durham Geography.