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Professor Jim Hall

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Professor Jim Hall

Professor of Climate and Environmental Risk (School of Geography and the Environment)
Senior Research Fellow (Department of Engineering Science)
Fellow (Linacre College)

Profile

Jim Hall FREng is Professor of Climate and Environmental Risks in the University of Oxford and Director of Research in the School of Geography and the Environment. Before joining the University of Oxford in 2011 to become Director of the University's Environmental Change Institute, Prof Hall held academic positions in the Newcastle University and the University of Bristol. Prof Hall 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. Professor Hall is a member of the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology, is a Commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission and is Vice President of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He was a member of the UK independent Committee on Climate Change Adaptation from 2009 to 2019 and was Chair of the Science Advisory Committee of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) from 2020 to 2022.

Prof 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. Prof Hall conceived of, and now chairs, the UK's Data and Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI). His systems analysis methods have been applied worldwide, including in Argentina, Bangladesh, China, Curacao, Jamaica, Kenya, St Lucia, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam, and globally. He has published more than 160 articles in peer reviewed journals, which have been cited more than 15,000 times, and was editor of the journal Water Resources Research from 2017 to 2022. 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.

Amongst various distinctions, Prof Hall was awarded the George Stephenson Medal from the Institution of Civil Engineers in 2001 and the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water in 2018. Prof Hall was a Contributing Author to the Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2010 Prof 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".

Areas of research

  • 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.

Projects

Publications

2022
2021
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
  • Beck, M.B., Jiang, F., Shi, F., Walker, R.V., Osidele, O.O., Lin, Z., Demir, I. and Hall, J.W. (2010) Re-engineering cities as forces for good in the environment. Proceedings of the ICE - Engineering Sustainability, 163(1): 31-46.
  • Hall, J.W. and Penning-Rowsell, E.C. (2010) Setting the scene for flood risk management. Chapter 1 in, Pender, G. and H. Faulkner (eds.) Flood Risk Science and Management. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 3-18. ISBN: 9781405186575.
  • Hall, J.W. and Pidgeon, N. (2010) A systems view of climate change. Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, 27(3): 243-253.
  • Hall, J.W. and Street, R. (2010) Strategic research on climate impacts and adaptation for infrastructure, the built environment and utilities: eight years of progress and future prospects. Engineering Sustainability, 163(1): 7-8.
  • Hine, D. and Hall, J.W. (2010) Information-gap analysis of flood model uncertainties and regional frequency analysis. Water Resources Research, 46(W01514).
  • Merz, B., Hall, J.W., Disse, M. and Schumann, A. (2010) Fluvial flood risk management in a changing world. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 10(3): 509-527.
2009
  • Buijs, F.A., Hall, J.W., Sayers, P.B. and Van Gelder, P. (2009) Time-dependent reliability analysis of flood defences. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 94(12): 1942-1953.
  • Dawson, R.J., Dickson, M.E., Nicholls, R.J., Hall, J.W., Walkden, M.J.A., Stansby, P., Mokrech, M., Richards, J., Zhou, J., Milligan, J., Jordan, A., Pearson, S., Rees, J., Bates, P., Koukoulas, S. and Watkinson, A. (2009) Integrated analysis of risks of coastal flooding and cliff erosion under scenarios of long term change. Climatic Change, 95(1-2): 249-288.
  • Dawson, R.J., Hall, J.W., Barr, S.L., Batty, M., Bristow, A.L., Carney, S., Dagoumas, A., Evans, S., Ford, A.C., Köhler, J., Tight, M.R., Walsh, C.L., Watters, H. and Zanni, A.M. (2009) A blueprint for the integrated assessment of climate change in cities. In, Tang, K. (ed.) Green CITYnomics. The urban war against climate change. Greenleaf Publishing, Sheffield. pp. 32-52.
  • Glendinning, S., Hall, J.W. and Manning, L. (2009) Asset-management strategies for infrastructure embankments. Proceedings of the ICE - Engineering Sustainability, 162: 111-120.
  • Hall, J.W. (2009) Integrated assessment to support regional and local scale decision making. In, Davoudi, S., Crawford, J. and Mehmood, A. (eds.) Planning for Climate Change: Strategies for mitigation and adaptation for spatial planners. Earthscan Publishing, London. pp. 236-248.
  • Hall, J.W., Boyce, S.M., Wang, Y., Dawson, R.J., Tarantola, S. and Saltelli, A. (2009) Sensitivity analysis of hydraulic models. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 135(11): 959-969.
  • Kriegler, E., Hall, J.W., Held, H., Dawson, R.J. and Schellnhuber, H.J. (2009) Imprecise probability assessment of tipping points in the climate system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(13): 5041-5046.
  • Manning, L.J., Hall, J.W., Fowler, H.J., Kilsby, C.G., Tebaldi, C. and others (2009) Using probabilistic climate change information from a multimodel ensemble for water resources assessment. Water Resources Research, 45(11).
2008
  • Dawson, R.J., Hall, J.W., Bates, P.D. and Nicholls, R.J. (2008) Quantified analysis of the probability of flooding in the Thames Estuary under imaginable worst case sea-level rise scenarios. In, Gopalakrishnan, C. and Okada, N. (eds.) Water and Disasters. Routeledge, London. pp. 36-50.
  • Dawson, R.J., Speight, L., Hall, J.W., Djordjevic, S., Savic, D. and Leandro, J. (2008) Attribution of flood risk in urban areas. Journal of Hydroinformatics, 10(4): 275-288.
  • Hall, J.W. and Solomatine, D. (2008) A framework for uncertainty analysis in flood risk management decisions. International Journal of River Basin Management, 6(2): 85-98.
  • Harvey, D.E., Peppe, R. and Hall, J.W. (2008) Reframe: A Framework Supporting Flood Risk Analysis. Journal of River Basin Management, 6(2): 163-174.
  • Lenton, T.M., Held, H., Kriegler, E., Hall, J.W., Lucht, W., Rahmstorf, S. and Schellnhuber, H.J. (2008) Tipping elements in the Earth's climate system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(6): 1786-1793.
  • Liang, Q., Du, G., Hall, J.W. and Borthwick, A.G.L. (2008) Flood inundation modeling with an adaptive quadtree grid shallow water equation solver. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 134(11): 1603-1610.
  • Lonsdale, K.G., Downing, T.E., Nicholls, R.J., Parker, D., Vafeidis, A.T., Dawson, R. and Hall, J. (2008) Plausible responses to the threat of rapid sea-level rise in the Thames Estuary. Climatic Change, 91(1): 145-169.
  • Manning, L.J., Hall, J.W., Kilsby, C.G., Glendinning, S. and Anderson, M.G. (2008) Spatial analysis of the reliability of transport networks subject to rainfall-induced landslides. Hydrological Processes, 22(17): 3349-3360.
  • Marashi, S.E., Davis, J.P. and Hall, J.W. (2008) Combination methods and conflict handling in evidential theories. International Journal of Uncertainty Fuzziness and Knowledge Based Systems, 16(3): 337-369.
2007
  • 1) Evans, E.P., Hall, J.W., Penning-Rowsell, E.C. and Thorne, C.R. (2007) Chapter 1: Overview. In, Thorne, C.R., Evans, E.P. and Penning-Rowsell, E.C. (eds.) Future Flood and Coastal Erosion Risks. Thomas Telford, London. pp. 3-12.
  • 2) Hall, J.W., Simm, J.D. and Evans, E.P. (2007) Chapter 2: Introduction to the Foresight ‘Future Flooding’ methodology. In, Future Flood and Coastal Erosion Risks. Thomas Telford, London. pp. 13-28.
  • 3) Simm, J.D., Thorne, C.R. and Hall, J.W. (2007) Chapter 12: Driver impact scoring, ranking and uncertainty. In, Thorne, C.R., Evans, E.P. and Penning-Rowsell, E.C. (eds.) Future Flood and Coastal Erosion Risks. Thomas Telford, London. pp. 185-206.
  • 4) Hall, J.W., Sayers, P.B., Panzeri, M. and Deakin, R. (2007) Chapter 13: Quantified assessment of driver impacts on future flood risk in England and Wales. In, Thorne, C.R., Evans, E.P. and Penning-Rowsell, E.C. (eds.) Future Flood and Coastal Erosion Risks. Thomas Telford, London. pp. 209-226.
  • 5) Sayers, P.B., Hall, J.W., Panzeri, M. and Deakin, R. (2007) Chapter 25: Quantified analysis of future flood risk management portfolios in England and Wales. In, Thorne, C.R., Evans, E.P. and Penning-Rowsell, E.C. (eds.) Future Flood and Coastal Erosion Risks. Thomas Telford, London. pp. 433-458.
  • 6) Watkinson, A.R., Evans, E.P., Hall, J.W., Penning-Rowsell, E.C. and Thorne, C.R. (2007) Chapter 28: Strategic Choices. In, Thorne, C.R., Evans, E.P. and Penning-Rowsell, E.C. (eds.) Future Flood and Coastal Erosion Risks. Thomas Telford, London. pp. 491-504.
  • Begum, S., Stive, M.J.F. and Hall, J.W. (2007) Flood Risk Management in Europe: Innovation in Policy and Practice. Springer, London. ISBN: 978-1-4020-4199-0.
  • Dickson, M.E., Walkden, M.J.A. and Hall, J.W. (2007) Systemic impacts of climate change on an eroding coastal region over the twenty-first century. Climatic Change, 84(2): 141-166.
  • Goodess, C.M., Hall, J.W., Best, M., Betts, R., Cabantous, L., Jones, P.D., Kilsby, C.G., Pearman, A. and Wallace, C.J. (2007) Climate scenarios and decision making under uncertainty. Built Environment, 33(1): 10-30.
  • Hall, J.W. (2007) Probabilistic climate scenarios may misrepresent uncertainty and lead to bad adaptation decisions. Hydrological Processes, 21: 1127-1129.
  • Hall, J.W. and O'Connell, E. (2007) Earth systems engineering: turning vision into action. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Civil engineering, 160(3): 114-122.
  • Hall, J.W., Fu, G. and Lawry, J. (2007) Imprecise probabilities of climate change: aggregation of fuzzy scenarios and model uncertainties. Climatic Change, 81(3): 265-281.
  • Nicholls, R.J., Tol, R.S.J. and Hall, J.W. (2007) Assessing impacts and responses to global-mean sea level rise. In, Schlesinger, M., Kheshgi, H., Smith, J.B., de la Chesnaye, F., Reilly, J.M., Wilson, T. and Kolstad, C.D. (eds.) Human-Induced Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Assessment. Cambridge University Press.
2006
  • Dawson, R. and Hall, J. (2006) Adaptive importance sampling for risk analysis of complex infrastructure systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science, 462(2075): 3343-3362.
  • Evans, E., Hall, J.W., Penning-Rowsell, E., Sayers, P., Thorne, C. and Watkinson, A. (2006) Future flood risk management in the UK. Water Management, 159(1): 53-61.
  • Hall, J.W. (2006) Soft methods in Earth Systems Engineering. In, Lawry, J., Miranda, E., Bugarin, A., Shoumei, L., Gil, M-A., Grzegorzewski, P., Hryniewicz, O. (ed.) Soft Methods for Integrated Uncertainty Modelling. Springer, Berlin. pp. 7-10.
  • Hall, J.W. (2006) Uncertainty-based sensitivity indices for imprecise probability distributions. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 91(10): 1443-1451.
  • Hall, J.W., Dawson, R., Manning, L., Walkden, M.J., Dickson, M. and Sayers, P. (2006) Managing changing risks to infrastructure systems. Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Civil engineering, 159: 21-27.
  • Hall, J.W., Sayers, P.B., Walkden, M.J.A. and Panzeri, M. (2006) Impacts of climate change on coastal flood risk in England Wales: 2030--2100. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 364(1841): 1027-1049.
  • Hamm, N.A.S., Hall, J.W. and Anderson, M.G. (2006) Variance-based sensitivity analysis of the probability of hydrologically induced slope instability. Computers and geosciences, 32(6): 803-817.
2005
  • Bates, P.D., Dawson, R.J., Hall, J.W. and Horritt, M.S., Nicholls, R.J., Wicks, J.K. and Hassan, M. (2005) Simplified two-dimensional modelling of coastal flooding for risk assessment and planning. Coastal Engineering, 52: 793-810.
  • Dawson, R., Hall, J.W., Sayers, P., Bates, P. and Rosu, C. (2005) Sampling-based flood risk analysis for fluvial dike systems. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment, 19(6): 388-402.
  • Dawson, R.J., Hall, J.W., Bates, P.D. and Nicholls, R.J. (2005) Quantified analysis of the probability of flooding in the Thames Estuary under imaginable worst-case sea level rise scenarios. Water resources development, 21(4): 577-591.
  • Hall, J.W., Sayers, P.B. and Dawson, R.J. (2005) National-scale assessment of current and future flood risk in England Wales. Natural Hazards, 36(1): 147-164.
  • Hall, J.W., Tarantola, S., Bates, P.D. and Horritt, M.S. (2005) Distributed sensitivity analysis of flood inundation model calibration. Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, 131(2): 117-126.
  • Hall, J.W., Twyman, C. and Kay, A. (2005) Influence diagrams for representing uncertainty in climate-related propositions. Climatic change, 69(2): 343-365.
  • Walkden, M.J.A and Hall, J.W. (2005) A predictive mesoscale model of the erosion and profile development of soft rock shores. Coastal Engineering, 52(6): 535-563.
2004
  • Dawson, R.J., Hall, J.W. and Davis, J.P. (2004) A performance-based decision-support process for flood defence asset management. Water Management, 157: 35-44.
  • Hall, J.W. and Lawry, J. (2004) Generation, combination and extension of random set approximations to coherent lower and upper probabilities. Reliability Engineering & System Safety, 85(1): 89-101.
  • Hall, J.W., Le Masurier, J.W., Baker-Langman, E.A., Davis, J.P. and Taylor, C.A. (2004) A decision-support methodology for performance-based asset management. Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, 21(1): 51-75.
  • Hall, J.W., Rubio, E. and Anderson, M.G. (2004) Random sets of probability measures in slope hydrology and stability analysis. Journal of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics, 84(10-11): 710-720.
  • Lawry, J., Hall, J.W. and Bovey, R. (2004) Fusion of expert and learnt knowledge in a framework of fuzzy labels. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 36(2): 151-198.
  • Rubio, E., Hall, J.W. and Anderson, M.G. (2004) Uncertainty analysis in a slope hydrology and stability model using probabilistic and imprecise information. Computers and Geotechnics, 31(7): 529-536.
2003
  • Davis, J.P. and Hall, J.W. (2003) A software-supported process for assembling evidence and handling uncertainty in decision-making. Decision Support Systems, 35(3): 415-433.
  • Dawson, R., Sayers, P.B., Hall J.W. and Bates, P. (2003) Flood risk assessment for Shoreline Management Planning. Proceeding of the ICE International Conference on Coastal Management, Brighton, UK 2003.
  • Hall, J.H., Dawson, R.J., Sayers, P.B., Rosu, C., Chatterton, J.B. and Deakin, R. (2003) A methodology for national-scale flood risk assessment. Water and Maritime Engineering, 156(3): 235-247.
  • Hall, J.W. and Lawry, J. (2003) Fuzzy label methods for constructing imprecise limit state functions. Structural Safety, 25(4): 317-342.
  • Hall, J.W., Evans, E.P., Penning-Rowsell, E.C., Sayers, P.B., Thorne, C.R. and Saul, A.J. (2003) Quantified scenarios analysis of drivers and impacts of changing flood risk in England Wales: 2030-2100. Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards, 5(3-4): 51-65.
  • Hall, J.W., Meadowcroft, I.C., Sayers, P.B. and Bramley, M.E. (2003) Integrated flood risk management in England Wales. Natural Hazards Review, 4(3): 126-135.
  • Ohl, C., Frew, P., Sayers, P., Watson, G., Lawton, J., Farrow, J., Walkden, M. and Hall, J.W. (2003) North Norfolk - a regional approach to coastal erosion management and sustainability in practice. International Conference on Coastal Management, January 2003.. 226-240.
2002
  • Hall, J.W. (2002) A contingency approach to choice. Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, 19(2): 87-118.
  • Hall, J.W. and Anderson, M.G. (2002) Handling uncertainty in extreme or unrepeatable hydrological processes - the need for an alternative paradigm. Hydrological Processes, 16(9): 1867-1870.
  • Hall, J.W., Meadowcroft, I.C., Lee, E.M. and van Gelder, P.H. (2002) Stochastic simulation of episodic soft coastal cliff recession. Coastal Engineering, 46(3): 159-174.
  • Lee, E., Meadowcroft, I., Hall, J.W. and Walkden, M. (2002) Coastal landslide activity: a probabilistic simulation model. Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment, 61(4): 347-355.
  • Sayers, P.B., Hall, J.W. and Meadowcroft, I.C. (2002) Towards risk-based flood hazard management in the UK. Civil Engineering, 150(5): 36-42.
  • Sayers, P.B., Meadowcroft, I.C., Hall, J.W., Gouldby, B.P. and Simm, J. (2002) Risk, performance and uncertainty in flood and coastal management - A review. A report for the Environment Agency by HR Wallingford. Also summarised in Meadowcroft IC, Sayers PB, Hall JW. (2002) paper of the same title presented at the Annual Conference of River and Coastal Engineers, University of Keele, June 2002.
2001
  • Hall, J.W. and Davis, J.P. (2001) Sources and implications of uncertainty for coastal managers. Water and Environment Journal, 15(2): 103-108.
  • Hall, J.W., Cruickshank, I.C. and Godfrey, P.S. (2001) Software-supported risk management for the construction industry. Civil Engineering, 144: 42-48.
  • Lee, E.M., Hall, J.W. and Meadowcroft, I.C. (2001) Coastal cliff recession: the use of probabilistic prediction methods. Geomorphology, 40(3): 253-269.
2000
  • Hall, J.W., Lee, E.M. and Meadowcroft, I.C. (2000) Risk-based benefit assessment of coastal cliff recession. Water and Maritime Engineering, 142: 127-139.
1998
  • Hall, J.W., Blockley, D.I. and Davis, J.P. (1998) Uncertain inference using interval probability theory. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, 19(3): 247-264.

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