Professor Robert Nicholls is a Professor of Coastal Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.
His research focuses on coastal problems and their solution, with a strong focus on sea-level rise and the hazards of coastal erosion and flooding, including how communities can adapt. He has studied the implications of sea-level rise in the UK and in many of the most sensitive regions of the world such as deltaic areas (e.g., Bangladesh) and small islands (the Maldives) as well as coastal cities and ecosystems (linking to Nature-based Solutions). A distinctive dimension of his research is taking an integrated assessment approach — assessing the coastal zone as an interacting system. This allows the multiple drivers and factors of change beyond sea-level rise and climate change to be appropriately considered, allow policy-relevant conclusions and support for sustainable development.
Robert is the former Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the principal developers of the DIVA (Dynamic Interactive Vulnerability Assessment) model, which assesses coastal risks and adaptation at broad scales up to the globe. DIVA has been used extensively for policy analysis over the last 25 years, such as estimating global coastal protection costs as part of the World Bank funded ‘Beyond the Gap’ 2019 study of infrastructure investment costs for climate change. He continues to use DIVA in international research such as in the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme (including the PROTECT, CoCliCo and REST-COAST Horizon2020 Projects which have recently been completed). He also led an influential global assessment of flood exposure in large port cities with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which is the foundation of many subsequent coastal city assessments.
Robert works more widely than coastal problems and – for example — led the OpenCLIM Project which developed methods to support future national and sub-national spatially-explicit climate risk assessment. This helped to inform a range of national and sub-national risk and adaptation assessments, including the national UK Climate Change Risk Assessments which are mandated by the UK Climate Change Act (2008).
Robert has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers, is the co-editor of seven books, and many articles and book chapters, including authorship of five assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other roles from 1992 to 2019. He co-led the World Climate Research Programme Sea-Level Rise Grand Challenge to deliver sea-level science to support better coastal impact and adaptation assessment from 2013 to 2022. He was a member of the COPRI Coastal Engineering Research Council from 2018 to 2026 who organize the bi-annual International Conference on Coastal Engineering (ICCE) with the most recent conference being held in Galveston, Texas in 2026. He was considered a highly cited scholar by the Web of Science in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2025. In Carbon Brief’s ranking of the most highly cited climate scientists published in 2026 he was ranked 147th globally and 4th in terms of literature cited by the IPCC. He holds a BSc in Geology and a PhD in Civil Engineering both from the University of Southampton.
Contact
Email: R.J.Nicholls@soton.ac.uk
Building Number: 178
Boldrewood Innovation Campus
University of Southampton
Southampton, SO16 7QF
UK