About me

I’m a climate scientist who currently does a lot of work on “adaptation”, addressing how people have responded to climate change in the past and how we might respond to further changes in climate in the future. A lot of my current work is with bodies such as the United Nations Development Programme, addressing how developing countries can increase their resilience to emerging and anticipated changes in climate.

My work on past climate change and human responses to it has taken me into the field of archaeology. From 1999-2001 I worked on the “Fezzan Project”, providing contextual information on past climatic changes for an archaeological study of the Garamantian culture and its predecessor societies, in the Fezzan region of south-western Libya. (This project was run by Prof. David Mattingly of the University of Leicester, who has recently started a new project in this region).

Since 2002 I have been directing the Western Sahara Project, which examines past climatic, environmental and cultural change in the north-western Sahara. This project focuses on the past 10,000 years, during which the Sahara experienced a humid climate (from about 10,000 - 5000 years before present or BP) before being transformed into today’s desert environment. The project’s main emphasis is on how Saharan populations responded to increasing aridity as the region dried out after around 6000 BP. Project fieldwork takes place in the disputed, non-self governing territory of Western Sahara, in the zone controlled by the indigenous Polisario independence movement. The remainder of Western Sahara is under Moroccan military occupation.

My work on climate change and the archaeology of the Sahara has led to further research on the impacts of climate change on societies across the globe during period between about 6000 and 4000 years ago. Across the Afro-Asiatic desert belt, and in parts of the Americas, the world’s first large, complex, highly urbanised , state-level societies were emerging against a backdrop of increasing aridity during this period. This increase in aridity was the result of global changes in climate driven by natural fluctuations in the Earth’s orbit. Across the northern hemisphere arid belt, these changes resulted in a weakening of monsoon systems and a general decline in rainfall, leading to widespread desertification in the areas that have come to be known as the “cradles of civilisation”. A major element of my current research involves the comparison of archaeological and environmental information relating to this period in order to examine the role of climate change in the emergence of the world’s first large, complex, urban civilisations. For a detailed treatment of this subject you can download this paper (pdf file, 324 kb).

More information on my research can be found on my professional website.