Category: PhD

Centre for Environmental Policy: 2016 PhD Research Symposium

Each year, the Centre for Environmental Policy holds a research symposium for its PhD students, giving them a chance to present their research to the members of the department. For this symposium, first year PhD students are required to produce a poster about their research, while second years are expected to present the progress made regarding their PhD. In this post, I’ll be giving a brief overview of the 2016 PhD research symposium held on the 29th June 2016 with some insights on the presentations from the members of the Environmental Quality Research Group.

The symposium started with brief poster discussions for the first year students to showcase their research.

Building a joint knowledge base for catchment management

Last month, Dr Nick Voulvoulis and I visited the Netherlands to meet our GLOBAQUA partner, Dr Adriaan Slob, to develop a policy work plan involving stakeholder collaboration workshops to facilitate the bridging of the science and policy gap for the GLOBAQUA catchment case studies. The meeting concluded with the need to promote interdisciplinarity between researchers, water managers, policy-makers and other actors within the catchment in both the assessment of water quality and improving management decisions to meet the objectives of the Water Framework Directive (WFD).

Why interdisciplinary knowledge is important in catchment management?

The management of water resources is becoming increasingly complex as it is deeply embedded within a diverse range of economic and cultural activities emphasising the need to understand how our society interacts with the natural water environment.

Systems versus Linear thinking

A few weeks ago, Alozie led a PhD workshop on systems thinking; exploring the concept’s theoretical roots and some research applications in both the management of water resources and mineral active regions.

Systems thinking in simple terms implies a rather general and superficial awareness of systems (a purposeful structure that consists of interrelated and interdependent elements or components) and using that awareness to treat something (a problem, an occurrence, a phenomenon) as a system. The concept has emerged in mainstream environmental science as a means to address the complex nature of environmental problems and as a result of the criticisms and limitations associated with more conventional and reductionist management thinking (“divide and conquer mentality”).