News

The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment would like to welcome the following Visiting Fellows:
Justin Adams : Justin was a senior executive at BP for 10 years until mid-2012, helping to create BP’s $8 billion renewables division, Alternative Energy. Justin has recently set up a boutique advisory company – Beyond – to evaluate, catalyse [...]

Monday, 18 March, 2013
The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment would like to congratulate Dr Angela Wilkinson on her new appointment as Counsellor for Strategic Foresight at OECD, where she will take up duty on 29th April 2013.
Dr Angela Wilkinson was appointed Programme Director of the Futures Directorate at SSEE in May 2010 to [...]

8 March 2013
Dr Richard Sandor, renowned economist and financial innovator, was named today Visiting Fellow with the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Richard Sandor is chairman and chief executive officer of Environmental Financial Products LLC, which specializes in inventing, designing, and developing new financial markets. EFP was established in [...]

Professor Robert Hahn, Professor of Environmental and Regulatory Economics at the Smith School, would like to supervise a few Ph.D. students in the general areas of environmental and regulatory economics. He is looking for students who have a solid understanding of microeconomics and statistics, are open-minded risk takers, and have a demonstrated commitment to academic excellence. External [...]

Professor Gordon Clark, Director of the Smith School, has been nominated by aiCIO magazine as of the top 10 most influential academics in the institutional investigating world. The Professors, their first list of 2013, introduces the top 10 academics influencing the finance industry. To read full article please click here.

The University of Oxford  launched a new research programme on Monday 11th February 2013 to help businesses and policy-makers future proof against investments in assets that might become devalued or written off, otherwise known as ‘stranded’. Assets become stranded for a number of different reasons: they can be supplanted by greener alternatives or technological innovations; or [...]

The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment would like to congratulate Martin Smith, Smith School Founding Benefactor,  whose philanthropy across education, science and the arts has been recognised with a knighthood in the 2013 New Year Honours list.
Martin, who studied physics at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, in the 1960s, has supported a wide range [...]

Business and Sustainability, the latest book by Mick Blowfield, Smith School Senior Research Fellow, is now available from all normal book outlets.  It is probably the first book to offer managers, academic, and students a comprehensive, objective overview of how the world’s sustainability challenges are affecting, and being affected by business.
Visit the Oxford University Press [...]

The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment has published a report looking at its achievements over the past five years.
Since its inception in 2008, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, has committed itself to combining academic and business thinking in the search for practical and innovative solutions to the complex environmental challenges [...]

Dr Oliver Inderwildi, Head of Low Carbon Mobility at the Smith School, and Dr David Ward, Senior Advisor to the Low Carbon Energy Centre at the Smith School, have published an analysis of the UK’s renewable energy policy. The paper, “Global and Local Impacts of UK Renewable Energy Policy”,  will be available in Energy & [...]

The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, the Rothschild Foundation and the University of Oxford have published a report outlining the summary of proceedings from Re|Source 2012, which took place in July this year.
Re|Source 2012 focused on the global resource challenge and bought together over 250 of the world’s most influential thinkers and leaders [...]

The Intelligent Aid Competition is on its 3rd year! Launched in 2010, Intelligent Aid challenges you to engage with and address a particular topic and this year’s topic is Renewable Energy! 
Inspired by Clifford Chance’s leading work in climate change and renewable energy, this year they are asking: “What do you think are the most successful ways in which governments [...]

 Anne Augustine, Director of The Convergency Partnership and Visiting Business Fellow at the Smith School, has published a new book.
 The First 100 Days on the Job: How to Plan, Prioritise and Build a Sustainable Organisation
 “Whippet-smart, focused and pragmatic, this a vital read for anyone at the helm of a sustainability project.”
-          LEO JOHNSON, Co-Founder of [...]

Catherine Cameron, Director of Agulhas: Applied Knowledge and a Visiting fellow at the Smith School, gives The Guardian a review of the book ‘The Nature of Business: Redesigning for Resilience by Giles Hutchins.
The full review can be seen here.
More  information about Catherine Cameron and her upcoming seminar at the Smith School can be found here.

Dr Oliver Inderwildi talks to Financial Sense Newshour
Dr Oliver Inderwildi, head of the Low-Carbon Energy Centre at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, has appeared on Financial Sense Newshour talking about his new book, Energy, Transport, & the Environment: Addressing the Sustainable Mobility Paradigm co-authored with Sir David King.
The book looks [...]

The second and final day of Re|Source 2012 saw the keynote speech delivered by President Bill Clinton where he called on people not to be disheartened by the lack of decisive change at a global level on environmental issues  and said that small steps could create the foundation for more radical action in the future.
President [...]

250 delegates convened at Oxford University’s Examination Schools yesterday (Thursday 12 July 2012) for day one of Re|Source 2012. 
 

The two day event is dedicated to engaging the financial and business community on the issues of food, water, energy supply and global growth and explores the best ways to tackle future scarcities.
Professor Sir David King, Director [...]

Dr. Angela Wilkinson, Director of Futures at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, has led sessions at a gathering of community leaders hosted by The Frost School of Business and Oxford University at Centenary College in Louisiana. The select group, named the Centenary–Oxford 2050 Fellows, engaged in community-based scenario building, learning ways to [...]

Catherine Cameron, Visiting Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, is one of a number of contributors to a new book, `2052: A Global Forecast for the next 40 years’ by Jorgen Randers. The book, launched by the Club of Rome in May 2012, explores the possibility that humankind might not survive [...]

Gregory Barker MP, Minister of State for Energy and Climate Change, visited the Smith School yesterday (Thursday 14 June 2012) and gave a lecture at The Oxford Union. In his speech the Minister set out how the UK should not just be the place to deploy renewable technologies but build and design them as well  [...]

Dr Mick Blowfield, Senior Research Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, has been named as the CMI’s (Chartered Management Institute) author of the month for June 2012.

In February 2012 he was awarded the CMI Management Book of the Year award for Corporate Responsibility, alongside co-author Alan Murray.
Corporate Responsibility faced competition from [...]

Radically transforming transport systems over the coming decades is both a necessity and a challenge, particularly in relation to their energy needs and environmental impact.
This is the conclusion of Energy, Transport & the Environment, the most comprehensive publication to date on the current mobility challenges. Edited by Professor Sir David King and Dr Oliver Inderwildi [...]

A new briefing paper on Water Security, Risk and Society has been published.
The briefing, by Dr Angela Wilkinson and Aisling O’Sullivan Darcy of the Smith School, set outs the critical challenges around water stress and how the drivers are diverse and interconnected.
Water Security, Risk and Society briefing

The international business and finance community must take the lead in solving increasing water, food and energy scarcity around the world as population growth and economic development puts greater strains on the planet’s resources.
The call to action was issued today (Monday 23 April 2012) by Re|Source 2012, a new initiative created by the University of [...]

A project running almost 10,000 climate simulations on volunteers’ home computers has found that a global warming of 3 degrees Celsius by 2050 is ‘equally plausible’ as a rise of 1.4 degrees.
The study, the first to run so many simulations using a complex atmosphere-ocean climate model, addresses some of the uncertainties that previous forecasts, using [...]

An urgent remodelling of the UK’s energy infrastructure is vital if the country wants to decarbonise without “the lights going out” and not be reliant on imported energy supplies, says a new report by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment (SSEE) at the University of Oxford.
“Towards a low carbon pathway for the UK” [...]

The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment together with UBS has hosted its first “Smith in the City” evening seminar. The series will profile leading thinkers from around the globe looking at some of the major issues and challenges facing the world’s economies and people.
The series launched on Wednesday 22nd February 2012 and was introduced [...]

The Arctic is a region undergoing significant changes through a combination of economic and political developments, as well as climatic and other environmental changes.
Often perceived as an outpost or frontier in a world of ever expanding human activity, the next 20 years are estimated to see an increase in economic activity with shipping, oil and [...]

The heat wave that struck western Russia in summer 2010, causing 55,000 deaths, was caused by a combination of manmade and natural factors. However, the frequency of occurrence of such heat waves has increased by a factor of three over recent decades, new research suggests.

A study, led by Oxford University scientists including Neil Massey of [...]

Professor Gordon Clark FBA, Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford University, has been appointed as the next director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. He will take up the new position in January 2013 succeeding the founding director, Professor Sir David King.
Professor Clark is an economic geographer with an interest in [...]

The very cold weather we have recently been experiencing across parts of the UK and Europe raises the question if this is normal, or if it is in fact part of a wider pattern of changing climate.

 
Dr Patrick McSharry was interviewed on China Central TV on this issue and commented: “We expect cold conditions at [...]

Dr Mick Blowfield, Research Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, has won the CMI (Chartered Management Institute) Management Book of the Year award with co-author Alan Murray.
Corporate Responsibility was up against competition in the Management and Leadership Textbook category of the competition and was shortlisted from a collection of over 250 [...]

Professor Sir David King has published an analysis of the oil market in Nature this week with Professor James Murray of the University of Washington, which demonstrates that since 2005 oil supply has reached a ceiling of economically affordable rates.
The resulting unheralded oil price spikes, ranging between $40 and $140 per barrel, act as a [...]

With 90% of transport fuels being oil-derived, uncertainty around depletion levels of conventional oil reserves combined with rising car ownership and climate change concerns, there remains a mammoth challenge to transform our oil-dependent transport industry.
Writing in the journal – Oxford Energy Forum, Tara Shirvani and Dr Oliver Inderwildi explore the interest in synthetic fuel production [...]