Professor Mark Pelling

Resilience

Mark Pelling is Professor of Geography at King’s College London. His research interests include social and institutional aspects of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, with a particular focus on urban contexts. He has worked in Latin America and the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. He has served as a consultant for UNHABITAT, UNDP, UNISDR, World Bank, DFID and a range of NGOs including Oxfam, Action Aid, Greenpeace, and The International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Mark’s research is interdisciplinary and has been funded by ESRC, NERC, DFID, EC and the British Academy including large projects supported by the Belmont Forum. Mark is Principal Investigator of the ESRC-DFID programme Urban Africa: Risk Knowledge. He has served on the international scientific steering committees of Future Earth Coasts, Integrated Research on Disaster Risk and the Stockholm Environment Institute, and as a Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC SREX and Working Group II urban chapters for AR5 and AR6. He is co-chair of the United Kingdom Alliance on Disaster Research.

Mark has a PhD in Geography from the University of Liverpool, an MSc Marine Resource Management from Heriot-Watt and a BSc Geography from the University of Hull. He has taught at the University of Guyana, University of Liverpool and King’s College London and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University and University of Cape Town. He is the author of seven books including Adaptation to Climate Change: from resilience to transformation (Routledge 2011) and The Vulnerability of Cities: social resilience and natural disaster (Routledge 2003) and over 80 peer review papers and book chapters.