"EvoFlood: The evolution of global flood hazard and risk" is a new £3.7m project that aims to revolutionise our understanding of flood risk. The project, involving the University of Oxford and led by the University of Hull and the University of Southampton, represents a collaborative endeavour of 9 UK universities, as well as multiple national and international end-user organisations.

In honour of International Women's Day 2021 SoGE celebrates 100 years of Women At Oxford by profiling 18 inspiring women and sharing their insights on what's next for the higher education sector.

New research led by Dr Lisa Wedding, published this week in Global Environmental Change, investigates the carbon-capturing potential of habitats along the California coast and details pathways incorporating blue carbon habitats into climate change policy.

Dr Amber Murrey is pleased to announce the launch of a new online postgraduate course, Decolonising Research Methodologies. The course is a collaborative project between Oxford and UNISA and is open to PhD/DPhil students in the social sciences at Oxford and universities in Africa. The course is free for all enrolled students and there are funds available to subsidise the costs of internet data/devices. Application deadline: 16 April

On 5th March, the School of Geography and the Environment became an international hub for decolonizing conservation, by hosting the panel 'The Future of Conservation: COP26 and Beyond'. Born out of #DecoloniseConservation, an engagement campaign from XR Youth Solidarity, the panel was a call to action to begin building solidarity ties between Indigenous and local community leaders and academics, in order to bring a united front to COP26 and seek protections for the rights of over 1.65 billion Indigenous peoples, local communities and Afro-descendants in high biodiversity areas.

Research has shed new light on the impact of humans on Earth's biodiversity. The findings suggest that the rate of change in an ecosystem's plant-life increases significantly during the years following human settlement, with the most dramatic changes occurring in locations colonized in the last 1500 years.

Dr Louise Slater has been awarded the Gill Memorial Award for outstanding early career research in physical geography in the 2021 Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) honours.

Dr Sneha Krishnan has been awarded a British Academy / Wolfson Fellowship, which she will hold from January 2022 to December 2024.

Pastoralists from Asia and Africa led a unique international discussion on April 19, 2021. This inspiring event brought together pastoralists from Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Mongolia and Tanzania to talk about their lives, herding and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. The 'Covid-19 and Pastoralists - International Virtual Forum' was the first effort to foster pastoral debate and engagement across continents, and was organised by Drs Troy Sternberg and Ariell Ahearn.

Evolution of multiple species from a single colonizer is something that has happened repeatedly on oceanic islands. Such radiations, can lead to tens or even hundreds of distinct species, often occupying a range of very different habitats with the expectation that these 'evolutionary winners' will be species so well-tuned to their island environments that they should also be locally successful and abundant. In a new study in Journal of Biogeography, an international team including Prof Rob Whittaker, has shown that it may not be so simple.