Professor Craig Hutton appointed founding director for the Sustainability and Resilience Institute
Craig Hutton, Professor of Sustainability Science, has been appointed as the founding director for our new Sustainability and Resilience Institute.
The Institute has been established to catalyse a step change in our research in this area, to position sustainability as a cornerstone of the university’s research and societal impact. It will increase engagement and collaboration across the university to address the most challenging problems facing our society and provide solutions to these challenges through research, innovation and expertise.
Professor Mark Spearing, Vice-President (Research and Enterprise), comments:
“The appointment panel was very impressed by Craig’s commitment to sustainability, across a wide range of activities. He has an excellent track record of leadership of major sustainability projects and has been particularly successful at engaging with a wide variety of stakeholders. We are convinced that he has the skills and vision to be an excellent founding director of the Sustainability and Resilience Institute and will enable our community to contribute strongly to the national and international sustainability agenda.”
Professor Craig Hutton comments:
"I am genuinely delighted to have been offered the opportunity to be the first Director of the Sustainability and Resilience Institute (SRI) at the University of Southampton. I can think of few more pressing questions than how we will choose to manage our planet for ourselves and future generations and believe that from Environment to Humanities, Information Systems to Health and Social Sciences we all have a part to play in answering that question. My appointment to this role comes after extensive collaborations over the last 20 years with a huge diversity of disciplinary experts from right across the University and beyond on the issues of sustainability, resilience, vulnerability, and our adaptation responses.”
Professor Craig Hutton has worked at Southampton for 23 years in the field of sustainability, more specifically the interface between social, economic and environmental development and the tools and methods by which these elements can be considered and integrated. Working in over 20 countries in Asia and Africa, key areas of research have included climate and environmental change impacts, livelihood and migration consequences of disasters such as flood, drought and riverbank erosion on vulnerable communities living near the largest river systems in the world (Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong) as well as the tools and methods of engaging government and local communities in decision making processes.
Craig has worked with multiple UN agencies, WB, UKRI and government funding in both research and enterprise roles. More recently he has been developing workshop tools that allow governments, institutions and organisations to consider strategic decision making in and around areas of scenarios of the future and sustainability and is applying these looking at health and wellbeing in young people in the UK.
Craig took up this new post yesterday, 13 March 2023. The appointment is 0.5 FTE. Craig can be contacted via email: cwh@geodata.soton.ac.uk