About the Project
How can we make chemical use in agriculture sustainable? Exploring possible futures to help make decisions today
Are you passionate about solving complex environmental challenges? Interested in creating non-toxic environments that benefit society and nature alike? This innovative and exciting PhD project, co-designed with non-academic partners, is part of the NERC-funded ECOSOLUTIONS Doctoral Focal Award, and offers the opportunity to address real world challenges with key opinion-formers to help support sustainable chemical development and create non-toxic urban & rural landscapes.
Project details
Chemicals such as pesticides are a key element of present day farming practice, but they come with risks of negatively impacting the environment. Global trends such as climate and demographic change, technological developments and changing policies can drive changes in how chemicals are used in farming, and therefore the potential wider environmental impacts. Decision-makers such as government departments, farmers, and the agrichemical sector need to understand how chemical use in farming may evolve, so that they can develop solutions to minimise chemical impacts while maintaining the societal benefits of farming. Scenarios and future projections are powerful tools for developing such knowledge, by exploring different possible trajectories of future farming practice and chemical use.
This project will explore potential futures of UK farming chemical use up to 2100 as a function of global trends and assess the environmental benefits and disbenefits of different pathways (e.g. chemical substitution by non-chemical alternatives). You will work with a set of exploratory socio-economic scenarios (the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) and use a range of desk-based analysis approaches and stakeholder consultation. You will then use exposure and ecological modelling, including Life Cycle Analysis, to explore how these changes, alongside environmental change (e.g. rainfall patterns, temperature) forecasts for different climate change scenarios, influence changes in environmental risk in agricultural systems – both from chemical use and from alternatives. The modelling results will be used to identify future benefits and disbenefits of alternative pathways and their key drivers, to then identify key intervention points and management approaches that could be taken up by decision makers to manage the future health of agricultural systems and the wider environment, while ensuring a sustainable food supply.
The ECOSOLUTIONS DFA
Led by the Universities of Sheffield and York and the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, ECOSOLUTIONS is a cutting-edge, transdisciplinary initiative. This innovative programme combines science, policy, and societal engagement to transform chemicals policy and management, enabling a safe, sustainable chemicals sector and non-toxic environments. This project is one of 18 projects that are available for the third ECOSOLUTIONS and final cohort who will work together to begin to understand and solve the problems of sustainable chemical design and use, as well tackling the problems that pollution causes in urban environments, rural landscapes and food systems.
What You will Gain
As an ECOSOLUTIONS PhD student, you will work with world-leading experts across diverse fields such as ecology, data science, digital solutions, chemistry, geography, psychology, environmental engineering, policy, and law. You will learn to tackle the risks posed by chemicals while enabling their societal benefits, adopting a whole-systems and solutions-focused approach.
You will receive 3 years and 9 months of funding and take part in a dynamic training and development programme, including:
- Induction course: Connect with fellow students, supervisors, and the ECOSOLUTIONS team while exploring the programme’s mission.
- Primer course: Gain foundational knowledge on the environmental risks that chemicals pose, policy landscapes, and sustainable chemical innovation.
- Transferable skills workshops: Master data management, big data methods, research practices, communication, stakeholder engagement and more.
- Systems-solutions workshops: Collaborate across disciplines to explore sustainable chemical design and development, address pollution in urban & rural landscapes, and develop actionable solutions.
- Three-month secondment: Joint Nature Conservation Committee
- International conferences: Share your findings and network with global experts.
The skills you will need
We are interested in applicants who can work across disciplinary boundaries. You may have expertise in data analysis, modelling and computational approaches, or experience applying social science methods to understand behaviour, governance and decision-making. Most importantly, you will be motivated to combine different forms of evidence to address environmental challenges.
Eligibility:
To be considered for the ECOSOLUTIONS DFA, you will need at least an upper 2nd class honours degree or equivalent in a relevant discipline.
As a collaboration of international research-led universities, we welcome students from all walks of life and from across the world. Within our programme, we are dedicated to diversifying our community.
As part of our ongoing work to improve Equality, Diversity and Inclusion we strongly encourage applications from UK/Home candidates from identified underrepresented groups: Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, those from a disadvantaged socio-economic background, and disabled people.
Project specific enquiries: Dr Stephen Lofts, stlo@ceh.ac.uk
Funding Notes
This is a full scholarship which will cover tuition fees and provide an annual stipend in line with UKRI recommended levels (£21,805 for the 2026/2027 academic year, TBC in 2027/2028) for the 45 months duration.
Due to CDT funding rules and Institutional policies, there is a cap on the number of scholarships that can be awarded to DFA students. Once this limit has been reached, ECOSOLUTIONS DFA scholarships will only be awarded to students who are eligible for Home fee status. York and UKCEH led projects can only fund applications from UK/Home eligible applicants and Sheffield can accept applications from both with very limited places for international students.