University of East Anglia (UEA), MSc, Climate Change

The MSc in Climate Change is based in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV). The course is designed to provide you with in-depth interdisciplinary knowledge of climate change science, society and policy. The course content equips our graduates for careers in areas as diverse as government agencies, business consultancies and academia.

Climate change and variability has played a major role in shaping human history and the prospect of global warming as a result of human activities presents society with increasing challenges over the coming decades.

This course provides an authoritative assessment of the subject, including recent climate history, present-day variations and climate prediction, the ways in which ideas of climate change impact on the environment, society and human welfare, and the role of climate science in policy development. Its temporal focus spans the Holocene period through to the year 2100, with particular emphasis on contemporary issues. You are encouraged to interact with the course content through a series of student-led debates.

The course covers the fundamentals of the changing climate, including the Earth’s energy balance, the general circulation of the atmosphere, causes of climate change and variability and the greenhouse effect. You will also learn about research methods, consisting of empirical approaches to climate reconstruction (e.g. tree ring analysis), data preparation and analysis, detection of anthropogenic changes and theoretical or model-based approaches to climate prediction. You will study the evidence and causes of recent climate change with a focus on the period from 1 AD to the present, including the atmospheric build-up of greenhouse gases and its consequences for the behaviour of the Earth system.

The ways in which climate change is understood by societies and how it influences the development of policy and stimulates social action is a key component of the course. This covers the social history of climate change, climate risk perception, climate economics, mitigation and adaptation. This includes an assessment of the Framework Convention of Climate Change, prospects for emissions control at the national and international level, climate geo-politics and equity and reconciling development issues with climate change.

The UEA MSc Climate Change programme enables graduates to enter a very wide variety of careers. Examples of areas and jobs that graduates have gone into are: environmental consultancy, postgraduate research (i.e. PhDs), fundamental or applied academic research, local government, utilities, health, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), climate impacts and policy, scientific publishing, government research agencies.