Robert Nicholls was the Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research from 2019 to 2024 and is currently Professor of Climate Adaptation. His research focusses on coastal problems and their solution, with a strong focus on sea-level rise, coastal erosion and flooding, and how society can adapt to these changes. 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 (e.g., the Maldives). A distinctive dimension of his research is taking an integrated assessment approach — assessing the coastal zone as an interacting system. This allows all the full range of drivers and factors of change to be considered, facilitating policy-relevant analysis and conclusions.

Robert is 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 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). He also led a global assessment of flood exposure in large port cities with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Robert has also led significant international projects on the integrated assessment of the development of deltas, including climate change, sea-level rise and other key human-induced drivers making an integrated assessment approach essential. Much of this recent work is in Bangladesh, via the ESPA Deltas and DECCMA Projects, including supporting the Bangladesh government Delta plan 2100.

Robert has published nearly 300 peer-reviewed papers, is the co-editor of six books, and many articles and book chapters, including authorship of five assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  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 is a member of the COPRI Coastal Engineering Research Council who organize the bi-annual International Conference on Coastal Engineering (ICCE). He holds a BSc in Geology and a PhD in Civil Engineering both from the University of Southampton, where he was Professor of Coastal Engineering from 2004 to 2019.