Research

Birkbeck Institute of Environment takes an active role in promoting environmental research and in providing commentaries on environmental issues. It works to promote cross-disciplinary debate, discussion, thinking and research on environmental issues.

Birkbeck Institute of Environment is open to any Birkbeck academics who wish to be a member. Its activities include seminars, conferences, symposia, reading groups and other academic events related to members' core interests, as well as providing an electronic resource that draws together social research carried out at Birkbeck. It promotes the research of its individual members as well as collaborative research programmes between its members and other institutions. It offers facilities for the supervision of research (MPhil/PhD) students with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity.

Major research foci are:

• environmental management;
• globalisation and world development;
• geo-information and analysis in policy development;
• conservation and ecology;
• protected area management and policy;
• modelling and monitoring of the aquatic environment.

The Institute of Environment incorporates the following major research centres at present:

1. Centre for European Protected Area Research (CEPAR) integrates a range of research, consultancy and training activities in protected area policy and management.
2. South East Regional Research Laboratory (SERRL) is a geographic data handling and analysis centre specialising in demographics, land use and urban and regional policy analysis.
3. Rural Evidence Research Centre (RERC) for Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) provides innovative, multi-disciplinary, research and evidence to support the development of policy for the social and economic regeneration of rural England.

Recent Awards

Institute of Environment associates John Shepherd and Martin Frost, have received a £41000 grant from East of England Development Agency to carry out a study of 'social and economic flows between rural and urban areas in East Anglia (Spring 2007).