School of Geography and the Environment

Nicholas Chow is a DPhil student in the Climate Systems and Policy Group at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. His current research centres around the interactions of policy, governance, and society with climate-driven infrastructure development. The outcomes of his work hope to create a systematic and globally-applied framework for considering the importance and impact of historically unquantified features of infrastructure development contexts known as enabling environments. 

Nicholas' research approach is informed by his training as a water resources and environmental engineer, and his years of work on water management, planning, and modelling at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation in California. There his focus was on applied, cross-cutting infrastructure, economic, and policy research. Prior to joining the University of Oxford, Nicholas earned his M.S. degree from UCLA in Civil and Environmental Engineering, with a focus in water. He also holds a B.A. in Geology with a focus in chemistry from Whitman College in Washington state.

Reports

• Adshead, D., Thacker, S., Fuldauer, L.I., Gall, S.S., Chow, N., Pant, R., Russell, T., Bajpai, A., Morgan, G., Bhikhoo, N., Boroto, D., Palmer, R., Cançado, D., Jain, N., Klöttschen, V., Lawal, H., Dery, P., Twum, E., Mohammed, G., Hall, J.W. and Agbesi, L. (2022) Ghana: Roadmap for resilient infrastructure in a changing climate. Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation, Accra, Ghana.

Publications

• Pierce, G, El‐Khattabi, AR, Gmoser‐Daskalakis, K, Chow, N. Solutions to the problem of drinking water service affordability: A review of the evidence. WIREs Water. 2021;e1522. https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1522
• Sixt GN, Strambo C, Zhang J, Chow N, Liu J, Han G. Assessing the Level of Inter-Sectoral Policy Integration for Governance in the Water–Energy Nexus: A Comparative Study of Los Angeles and Beijing. Sustainability. 2020; 12(17):7220. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12177220
• Pierce, G., Chow, N., DeShazo, G. (2019) “The Motivation for State-Level Drinking Water Affordability Programs: Conceptual and Empirical Evidence from California.” Utilities Policy
• Ho, D., Coffineau, N., Hickman, B., Chow, N., Koffman, T., Schlosser, P. (2016) “Influence of Current Velocity and Wind Speed on Air-Water Gas Exchange in a Mangrove Estuary.” Geophysical Research Letters. 43(8), pp.3813-3821.