Climate Systems

July 2026 was the warmest July on record at the Radcliffe Meteorological Station, and the driest since 1825

Researchers led by SoGE’s Dr Sarah Wilson Kemsley have demonstrated an improved approach to predicting heat-related mortality in Europe, using machine learning.

By reconstructing how environmental conditions evolved across southeastern Arabia over time, the research aims to explain how early human populations adapted to extreme arid landscapes and dispersed beyond Africa.

Three DPhil students from Engineering and Geography have won the First Prize in the 2025 European Competition on Net Zero Data Centres.

The University of Oxford, in partnership with five leading institutions, has launched the Interdisciplinary Life and Environmental Science Landscape Award (ILESLA). This ambitious doctoral training programme will prepare a new generation of creative, collaborative, and entrepreneurial researchers who are equipped to meet the complex, cross-disciplinary challenges the world faces.

Following devastating floods in 2020, five successive failed rainy seasons caused drought which exposed millions of people to acute food shortages in East Africa. The field project, MASIKA, is the first of its kind and aims to understand the atmospheric processes operating at the start the rainy season. 

The Kalahari is warming at over twice the global rate, with climate projections indicating a gradual drying of the Kalahari, leading to more intense droughts. These trends present a profound threat to communities who have lived there for millennia and to the unique desert ecosystems. Over Christmas and New Year, a team of researchers from SoGE and University of Cape Town travelled to the Kalahari to retrieve some of the first detailed atmospheric observations from inside the Kalahari Desert in a bid to understand these troublesome climate trends.

School of Geography Alumna Lucy Temple and Rose Aldridge’s award-winning short film, 'On the Brink', documents the dramatic effects of climate change on small glaciers in the Bernese Oberland, Switzerland, aiming to connect viewers emotionally with the growing fragilities of the alpine environment.