Modelling climate adaptation futures in the Arctic

One full scholarship is available in the School of Geography in 2025. This scholarship is open to UK applicants and covers fees plus maintenance, and associated fieldwork costs.

This fully funded PhD place provides an exciting opportunity to pursue postgraduate research in a range of fields relating to climate change, adaptation, and behavioural modelling, working with both Indigenous knowledge and science approaches in the Arctic.

The School of Geography invites applications from prospective postgraduate researchers who wish to commence study for a PhD in the academic year 2025.

The award is open to full-time candidates (UK only) who have been offered a place on a PhD degree at the School of Geography.

The Arctic is undergoing transformative climate change, with profound implications for transportation systems. The lengthening of the shipping season in the Arctic Ocean is well-documented, with warming temperatures also compromising the operating period and safety of winter roads. Less studied are the more informal transportation networks involving use of unmaintained trails on frozen lakes, rivers, ocean, and the frozen ground, which are critically important for travel between communities, to cultural sites, and for practicing traditional hunting and fishing activities which have particular importance for Indigenous communities. 

The recently funded ETHNO-CLIM project (ERC Advanced Grant) is developing new conceptual and methodological tools to understand how different cultures encounter, perceive, adapt to, and interact with climate change. Collaborating with Inuit communities in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, the project focuses on the use of trails in a rapidly warming Arctic, combining both ‘bottom-up’ participatory modelling of current and projected climate-risk, and storytelling and visioning to create scenarios of how such changes might be experienced and responded to. As a PhD student, you will join an international and cross-cultural research team and will be responsible for working in the Canadian partner communities, building upon pilot research (Ford et al., 2019, 2023) to co-develop models to explore how projected changes in trail conditions might be experienced and responded to by communities at different levels of warming (e.g. Roxburgh et al., 2021), combining these models with already established trail access models (Ford et al., 2019, 2023) to simulate how climate risk may change this century. 

The PhD project will be on the cutting edge of developing innovative interdisciplinary approaches to connect science and Indigenous knowledge within a participatory modelling environment. Reflecting the interdisciplinary nature of the work, you will be supervised by a human geographer who works with Indigenous knowledge systems in the Arctic (Prof. Ford) and a computational geographer who specialises in developing models for simulating human systems (Prof. Malleson). You will be expected to spend considerable time doing fieldwork, co-developing the research with local partners, and conducting interviews, focus groups, and participatory modelling, and you must therefore be comfortable working in challenging cross-cultural contexts and climates. You will have prior experience collaborating with communities (be it in the Arctic or elsewhere), and have worked with qualitative and quantitative data and models. You will have a good foundational knowledge of statistics and some experience in computer programming and modelling, or the enthusiasm to learn these quantitative skills during the PhD.

Eligibility

• Applicants must not have already been awarded or be currently studying for a doctoral degree.
• Award must be taken up by 1st March 2025.
• Applicants must live within a reasonable distance of the University of Leeds whilst in receipt of this scholarship.

How to apply

For more information on eligibility and how to apply, please visit the project page on the University website.