NERC Council member
Professor Peter Cox is a member of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Council.
Professor Cox is an international leader in the understanding of interactions between the land biosphere and climate change. He led the team that carried out the first climate simulations to include the carbon cycle and vegetation as interactive components, which highlighted the possibility of Amazon Forest dieback under climate change.
Peter is a lead author on the fourth, fifth and sixth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a member of the UK government’s Defra Scientific Advisory Council. He has been named as a highly cited author by Thomson-Reuters for every year from 2014 onwards and won an ERC Advanced Grant in 2017.
Peter’s work was central to the early development of the Met Office Hadley Centre, where he held several positions including Head of Climate, Chemistry and Ecosystems, and since 2006 he has been driving the development of world-leading climate research at the University of Exeter.
Having trained originally as a theoretical physicist, at the University of Warwick, University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, he has brought new perspectives on modelling global vegetation under climate change. His original global vegetation model (called ‘TRIFFID’) continues to be used in Met Office climate models, and he has made multiple contributions to the JULES land surface scheme that also features in all of the Met Office’s weather forecast models.
More recently, he has led a team at the University of Exeter which developed a new vegetation demography model which is much more suitable to explore the role of forests in climate change and climate change mitigation. Peter has pioneered the development of ‘emergent’ constraints on future climate change, using an ensemble of climate models along with observations of the contemporary climate to reduce uncertainties in climate projections.
Peter’s work has been widely referenced and covered by the media, including an influential TV programme with Sir David Attenborough on climate change where he explained, via research in climate modelling, climate change over time from 1850 to 2000 and the effects of global warming. His projections of Amazon Forest dieback under climate change have been covered in a number of TV programmes (for BBC, Channel 4, and major channels in the US, Finland, the Netherlands and Australia), and are now looking more and more prescient (2023 was the most severe drought ever recorded in large parts of Amazonia).
Professor Cox is the academic lead for the award-winning Grand Challenges programme for undergraduates at the University of Exeter, a programme which enables 400 to 500 students each year to work within interdisciplinary groups of other like-minded students to design innovative solutions to real world challenges. In an extensive post-exams’ week, student teams focus on major challenges for humanity, including:
- the climate crisis
- global security
- sustainable good
- gender inequality
- mental health
Through his leadership of the Grand Challenges programme from its inception in 2012 to now, Professor Cox has helped to nurture a new generation of young people ready to tackle these challenges together.
In addition to his research and education contributions, Peter has spent much of his career serving the global community in support of innovative and impactful solutions to climate change, including providing expert advice to government policymakers and research councils.
His previous roles include:
- serving on the Defra Science Advisory Council for almost six years (2018 to 2024), especially offering advice on Defra’s net zero research
- member of the DECC Chief Scientist’s advisory board (2012 to 2014)
- member of the NERC Science Board (2013 to2017)
- member of the REF Earth & Environmental Sciences panel for REF2014
- being on the advisory boards for major institutes in the US and Germany
Last updated: 11 April 2025