Biography
Professor Hall addresses how much we need to adapt to climate change, and the risks to infrastructure systems. He 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.
He is a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology, Expert Advisor to the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority. He was a member of the UK independent Committee on Climate Change Adaptation from 2009 to 2019, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) from 2020 to 2022.and was a Contributing Author to the Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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.
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.
In 2010 Professor 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' and in 2025 was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has published more than 200 articles in peer reviewed journals, which have been cited more than 40,000 times, and was 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.
