Sarah Gall

Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in Geography and the Environment

Supervisors: Professor Jim Halland Professor Michael Obersteiner

Exploring land-use trade-offs in a rapidly changing economic and policy environment

Academic Profile

Sarah Gall is a DPhil student at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Her DPhil project is focused on questions around land-use trade-offs between different objectives such as food security, climate mitigation and biodiversity and how sustainability targets and political interventions can navigate those interdependencies towards a more sustainable land-use future. In particular, the project aims to identify trade-offs, locate key focus areas, examine policy goals and their implications for the development of new regulations and funding schemes. Her research is supervised by Professor Jim Hall and Professor Michael Obersteiner. It is done in cooperation with the FABLE UK Team (Food, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Land-Use, and Energy Consortium). FABLE is an international research consortium, which is part of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and aims to understand how countries can transition towards sustainable land-use and food systems.

Additionally, her research is part of the Oxford Martin School's LEAP (Livestock, Environment And People) project and is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Sarah has a master's degree in Environmental Engineering with distinction from the Technical University in Munich. As part of her master’s, she did research on water quality and water treatment infrastructure at Stanford University and the University of California, Davis. Alongside her DPhil, she is working in collaborations with the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), developing assessments of climate risks and adaptation needs of infrastructure across the water, energy and transportation sectors for projects in Ghana and Bangladesh.

Sarah Gall
Environmental Change Institute