The Institute promotes an interdisciplinary approach to research.  It engages with a wide variety of topics through academic research as well as applied research and consultancy studies. 

The formation of the Institute through the reorganisation of two existing units – the Centre of Urban Planning and Environmental Management and the Kadoorie Agricultural Research Centre – provides us with an important and challenging opportunity to extend and build on existing research interests and strengths and to develop new areas of interdisciplinary research activity.

Our research strategy will address sustainability and environmental issues through the mechanism of a series of research initiatives linked to the broad theme of regional environmental security with a particular emphasis on countries of the Asia-Pacific region.  This theme allows us to accommodate a diverse research agenda extending across the natural, engineering and social sciences.  This agenda will include, for example, energy and the environment, public health and the environment, climate change and biodiversity, food security, water and sanitation, disaster management and planning, business responses to sustainability and corporate environmental responsibility, the role of technological innovation, sustainable behaviour and consumption, and institutional capacity building, governance and public policy.

While the core academic staff of the Institute work primarily in areas related to the interface between public policy and sustainability and environmental issues, our remit is to foster collaborative interdisciplinary research across the University as a whole.  To achieve this we shall be launching a number of initiatives during the coming year including a research seminar series, the preparation of policy review papers and research monographs, an annual theme-based research symposium to which we will invite prominent figures from the international research community, and a 'research hotel' for colleagues from the University to explore research themes collectively in an interdisciplinary environment.