Professor James D. Ford

Profile

I am a Professor and Priestley Chair in Climate Adaptation at the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures. My research focuses on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and I work closely with Indigenous communities in the Arctic and globally with a major focus on health and well-being, food security, wildfires, and resource management. My work in the Arctic is funded through an ERC Advanced Grant which is weaving together science and Indigenous Knowledge to create an ethnoclimatology of climate risk. I also Co-Chair the NFRF funded Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON) which is working with Indigenous communities across the Global South and North to understand the climate-food-health nexus. At a global to regional scale, I am active in research tracking climate adaptation progress, including using big data and machine learning.

Since 2015 I have been editor-in-chief at Regional Environmental Change, and I have served as a lead author on national and international climate assessments including the IPCCs Special Report on 1.5C of warming and associated Summary for Policy Makers, and the Arctic Council’s Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic assessment. I currently serve on the Scientific Advisory Group to UNEPs GEO-7 Assessment, and I am member of the International Arctic Science Committee’s Social and Human Working Group. I have served on a diversity of review committees, including the ERC Consolidator Grant Panel, Genome Canada, and scientific granting councils in the UK and Canada. I have a wealth of experience consulting for international organisations and government, and in 2019 helped lead an assessment of climate programming for the International Atomic Energy Agency. I have published >300 peer reviewed articles—including articles in the Lancet and Nature Climate Change—and in 2021 I was ranked 49th in the Reuters Hot List of 1,000 top climate scientists globally.

Research interests

Climate change; Vulnerability; Resilience; Risk; Adaptation; Indigenous Peoples; Arctic

• ARCWISE: Arctic Resilience, Climate Adaptation, and Indigenous Wisdom for Sustainable Ecosystems
• IHACC - Indigenous Health Adaptation to Climate Change
• Impacts of cryosphere-hydrosphere change on ecosystems and livelihoods in northern Nunatsiavut, Canada (IMAGINE)
• International Indigenous Mentorship Program (IIMP)
• Reconceptualising climate impacts from the bottom-up: An ethnoclimatology of climate risk (ETHNO-CLIM)
• The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON): The Climate-Food-Health Nexus
• The Indigenous Peoples Observatory Network (IPON): Understanding and responding to complex climate-health emergencies
• Tooniktoyok: Monitoring the dynamic, contextual nature of climate change vulnerability among Inuit hunters of Canada’s Far North

Qualifications

• PhD, Geography (Guelph, 2006)
• MSc, Environmental Change (Oxford, 2001)
• BA, Geography (Oxford, 2000)

Student education

I teach on modules for the Climate Futures MSc and GEOG1000 (Planet Under Threat)

Research groups and institutes

• Climate Change Adaptation, Vulnerability and Services
• Sustainability Research Institute

Current postgraduate researchers

• Ingrid Arotoma Rojas
• Fanhui Dong
• Sanola Sandiford