Professor Mark Pelling

Mark Pelling is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography. Mark is Professor in Risk and Disaster Reduction at UCL.

Previously, he was a Professor of Geography at King's. Before this, he was based at the departments of Geography at University of Liverpool and University of Guyana. 

He has served as a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report and Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) and as lead author on its Fifth Assessment Report.

He is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Development Team for the Future Earth Risk Knowledge Action Network.

He chairs the Centre for Integrated Research on Risk and Resilience, and is currently seconded for half his time to the United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund as a Resilience Challenge Lead.

Research

• Disaster risk reduction
• Adaptation to climate change
• Urban political ecology

Mark's research interests include the institutions and social relationships that shape vulnerability and adaptation to natural disasters, including those associated with climate change, and in the ways in which conflicting values and practices of development inform resilience and transformation in the face of environmental change.

He seeks to better understanding the social production of vulnerability to environmental change and hazard, and in partnering with practitioner organisations in promoting proactive and egalitarian international risk reduction agendas.

In recent years he has published on disaster risk reduction, adaptation to climate change and resilience and transformation.