Biography
Jim Hall FREng is Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks in the University of Oxford and Director of Research in the School of Geography and the Environment. Before joining the University of Oxford in 2011 to become Director of the University's Environmental Change Institute, Prof Hall held academic positions in the Newcastle University and the University of Bristol. Prof Hall is internationally recognised for his research on risk analysis and decision making under uncertainty for water resource systems, flood and coastal risk management, infrastructure systems and adaptation to climate change. Professor Hall is a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology and is Expert Advisor to the National Infrastructure Commission. He is Chair of the Science Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). He was a member of the UK independent Committee on Climate Change Adaptation from 2009 to 2019.
Professor Hall's group in the University of Oxford is at the forefront of risk analysis of climatic extremes and their impacts on infrastructure networks and economic systems, from local to global scales. He led the development of the National Infrastructure Systems Model (NISMOD), which was used for the UK's first National Infrastructure Assessment and for analysis of the resilience of energy, transport, digital and water networks in Great Britain. His group developed the first national water resource systems simulation model for England and Wales. Prof Hall conceived of, and now chairs, the UK's Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI). His systems analysis methods have been applied worldwide, including in Argentina, China, Curacao, St Lucia, Tanzania and Vietnam. He has published four books, including, The Future of National Infrastructure: A System-of-Systems Approach, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.
Amongst various distinctions, Prof Hall was awarded the George Stephenson Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2001 and the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water in 2018. Prof Hall was a Contributing Author to the Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2010 Prof Hall was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering "for his contribution to the development of methods for flood risk analysis, which underpin approaches for flood risk management in the UK and internationally". He has published more than 160 articles in peer reviewed journals, which have been cited more than 15,000 times, and is editor of the journal Water Resources Research.
Research Interests
- Climate adaptation decisions
Engineering adaptation to global change. Decision analysis. Robust decision making under uncertainty. Info-gap theory. Decision support for futures and scenarios analysis.
- Integrated assessment of coupled human and natural systems.
National assessment of infrastructure systems. Infrastructure systems reliability and interdependence. Integrated assessment of long term change in cities. Methodologies for uncertainty analysis in integrated assessments.
- Uncertainty representation in modelling and risk analysis of engineering and environmental systems.
Random set and imprecise probability theories. Sensitivity analysis and model calibration.
- Flood risk analysis and management.
Broad scale flood risk analysis. Reliability analysis of flood defence systems. Advanced sampling based methods. Impacts of climate change and socio-economic change on flood risk. Robust flood risk management decisions under uncertainty.
- Coastal erosion prediction and appraisal.
Simplified process-based modelling of coastal system evolution over extended time and space scales. Stochastic simulation of coastal cliff recession. Use of probabilistic information in coastal management. Impacts of sea level rise.
