Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton

Robert Nicholls is Professor of Coastal Engineering, Deputy Head of School (Research) and Co-Director of the University-wide Centre for Coastal Processes, Engineering and Management. His main technical areas of interest are long-term coastal engineering and management, especially the issues of coastal impacts and adaptation to climate change, with an emphasis on sea-level rise. Particular interests include: 1. Coastal implications of climate change: impacts and responses. 2. Integrated assessment of coastal areas 3. Large-scale coastal morphological behaviour 4. Soft coastal engineering 5. Shoreline management Currently, he is Programme Leader of the coastal research theme in Phase II of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and is contributing to the OECD study of "Climate Impacts for Port Cities" "(main report)", NERC QUEST Programme "Global Scale Impacts Study" and he will conduct the coastal assessments in the EU-funded "Climate Costs". He is also contributing to the EA/DEFRA Research project on Coastal Geomorphology. He participated in the influential and widely-cited DEFRA-funded “Fast Track” assessments as the coastal expert, led the SURVAS Project which reviewed vulnerability of coastal zones around the world from 1999 to 2001. He was a lead investigator on the DINAS-COAST Project which lead to the development of the DIVA tool for sub-national to global vulnerability assessment. He has also provided expertise to national assessments such as the Office of Science and Technology Foresight Flood and Coastal Defence Assessment and the supplementary Pitt Review (published 2008), and international assessments such as the GEF-funded ‘Caribbean: Planning for Adaptation to global Climate Change’, as well as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (see below). He was lead author of chapters in four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007): Second Assessment Report (1996); the Regional Assessment (1998); the Special Report on Technology Transfer (2000); and the Third Assessment Report (2001), and has just finished being convening lead author for the “Coastal Systems and Low-Lying Areas” chapter in the IPCC 4th assessment (published 2007). He is an Associate Editor of Journal of Coastal Research and ICE Civil Engineering. He is author of more than 100 journal papers and book chapters (with 24 journal papers published since 2000). He gave the following keynotes/invited lectures during 2007: (1) World Meteorological Organisation, Fifteenth Congress, Geneva, May 2007; (2) World Economic Forum, African Summit, Cape Town, June 2007; (3) Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, 24th Assembly, Paris, June 2007; (4) IPCC Working Group II Report Launch, Royal Geographical Society, London, September 2007; (5) Bilateral Symposium–Coastal Defence and Flood Management: The effect of climate change on water management, The Hague, October 2007; (6) United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Workshop on “Financial and investment flows to address climate change: The way forward” (7) Expert Symposium, Climate Change: Modelling, Impacts & Adaptations, National University of Singapore, December 2007. His Teaching involves undergraduate and postgraduate contributions to both the Civil Engineering and Envivornmental Science Programmes, most particularly the MSc Engineering in the Coastal Environment.. He also leads the University of Southampton involvement in the Erasmus Mundus MSc Coastal and Marine Engineering and Management (CoMEM),which is lead by Delft University of Technology and also involves NTNU (Trondheim), UPC (Barcelona) and City University (London).

Coastal engineering, Coastal management, Coastal morphology, Coastal processes,

Details of impact research can be found here.

External website Research Projects

iCOASST- integrating coastal sediment systems

Primary research group:  Energy and Climate Change

Research projects