Environmental Change and Policy (Taught)

The information provided on this page was correct at the time of publication (November 2025). For complete and up-to-date information about this course, please visit the relevant University of Oxford course page via www.graduate.ox.ac.uk/ucas.

This MSc equips future environmental leaders with the critical thinking, research expertise, and analytical tools needed to design and evaluate policies for addressing the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.

The MSc in Environmental Change and Policy (ECP) places strong emphasis on both environmental change and the policy and practice needed to respond to it, aligning with emerging demands in the field for graduates who can both understand and act upon environmental science.

Within the University, the course offers a unique blend of policy and environmental change studies. While it complements other environmental-related courses – such as those in environmental law, economics, and sustainability – it is distinctive in its focus on actionable policy design in the environmental sphere, a critically important area for addressing the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.

The MSc ECP fills a gap in existing environmental courses by offering integrated, interdisciplinary training that not only connects global environmental changes with practical policy responses, but also explicitly links environmental research to policy-making – a feature that is not typically emphasised in both undergraduate and graduate environmental courses. Its focus on leadership development and research-based evidence for policy aligns with the needs of future employers in government, international agencies, and NGOs.

The course aims to:

• Examine the nature, causes and impacts of major types of global environmental changes, and how these changes operate and interact across space and time and in relation to physical, ecological, social and cultural systems.

• Engage the economic, legal, cultural, and ethical underpinnings of environmental responsibility and systemic policy solutions, including mitigation, adaptation, remediation, enhanced resource stewardship and other sustainable responses to environmental change across space and time.

• Empower environmental policy and decision makers with the analytical and practical skills, integrity, and a critical understanding of physical, ecological, social, and cultural systems in relation to environmental change, necessary to address the world’s most pressing environmental problems.

• Integrate students into the world-leading research taking place in the Environmental Change Institute and the wider School of Geography and the Environment.

• Enhance students personal and professional development, embedding the knowledge and skills needed to go on to further advanced research, policy, academic business, NGO or other environmental leadership work in the Environmental Change Institute and elsewhere.

By the end of the course you will be able to design and evaluate actionable policies responding to environmental change. This will be achieved through the following key supporting outcomes:

• Understand and critically appraise the key drivers, dimensions, theories and debates related to environmental changes, their inter-connections, and to policy and action.

• Analyse, select, and apply key research skills, methods and techniques for understanding and responding to environmental change.

• Communicate and collaborate with diverse audiences to support environmental leadership and empowerment.