Staff past and present from the geography department with other attendees at the lecture to mark 70 years of geography at Swansea 1954-2024
A world expert on wildfires, Professor Stefan Doerr, has given a public lecture at Swansea University about his work, marking 70 years of the University’s geography department.
The topic was ‘Climate change and the global ‘wildfire crisis’ – unravelling myths from realities’.
More than a hundred people attended the lecture, which was open to all. The audience included partners of the department including Natural Resources Wales, the Carbon Community, Cardiff University, local schools, the National Fire Chiefs Council, and the West Glamorgan Archive Service.
Professor Doerr is based in the geography department at Swansea University. He is professor of wildland fire science, studying the effects of fire on landscape, soils and water, as well as global fire patterns and trends. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Wildland Fire.
As a world authority on wildfires, he has given expert comment widely in the UK and international media on the fires in Los Angeles and other places.
The lecture also marked him receiving the prestigious Murchison award from the Royal Geographical Society for his global expertise in understanding wildfires.
Over the last 70 years, between 20,000 and 25,000 students have graduated from the department of geography at Swansea University.
In its early days the department’s interests were largely focused on physical geography and gartography. Today, its research interests are more diverse and range from cultural, social and economic geography to climate and environmental change, glaciology, and earth observation.
The department now offers distinct Physical and Human Geography schemes as well as Environmental Geoscience and Environmental Science and the Climate Emergency programmes. It offers postgraduate taught schemes as well as a significant percentage of Welsh-language modules.
Field courses remain a highlight of geography study. Over the years Swansea students have gone to Devon, Cornwall, Isle of Mann, Ireland, Austria, Mallorca, Vancouver, New York, Borneo and Sikkim. In a few months, Geography students will be heading to Iceland, the Isles of Scilly, Berlin, Vancouver and the Eifel region of Germany.
Dr Angharad Closs Stephens, head of the geography department at Swansea University, said:
“Wildfires are one of the major issues of our time and this lecture was a unique opportunity for the public to hear from one of the world’s leading experts.
Professor Doerr’s lecture and his research are the latest example of how – over the past 70 years – geography at Swansea has been focused on understanding issues of enormous importance.
From the1960s, when Swansea geographers played a central role in the Lower Swansea Valley Project, a pioneering initiative that reclaimed the area from its post-industrial devastation, paving the way for the regeneration that we see there today, to projects improving climate and weather predictions, and understanding what is happening in polar regions today, our work has both a local and global impact”.
The geography department undertakes world-leading research through a range of platforms and ventures, including the NERC CLASSIC centre in Earth Observation, the Jotunheimen expedition, the Millennium project, the Centre for Migration Policy Research, the South East Asian Rainforest Research Partnership in Danum, the Climate Action Research Institute and most recently the Centre for Wildfire Research led by Professor Stefan Doerr.