James Ford

I am a Priestley Chair in Climate Change Adaptation at the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds. My research focuses on how climate change is experienced, understood, and responded to at community level, with a major focus on health and well-being, food security, wildfires, and resource management. I mostly work with Indigenous peoples in the Arctic, but I have also been involved in projects across the global south, including the COVID-Observatories which is working with Indigenous peoples in 12 nations. At a global to regional scale, I am active in developing novel approaches to tracking climate change adaptation (including using big data and machine learning), developing systematic review approaches in an environmental change context. 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 the Arctic Council’s Adaptation Actions for a Changing Arctic assessment. I have published >240 peer reviewed articles and in 2021 I was ranked 49^th in the Reuters Hot List of 1,000 top climate scientists globally.

Full profile: https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/see/staff/1030/professor-james-ford