Crisis and Disaster Management

Overview This course offers an exciting opportunity to learn about environmental and manmade hazards, vulnerability and risk, planning and logistics, disaster response and crisis management. You’ll develop your skills as a confident, professional emergency planner and responder, able to manage people and situations in the field.

Uniquely to Portsmouth, students take part in SIMEX, the UK’s largest annual disaster response simulation exercise – for responders and agencies to practise and learn from disaster response.

You'll graduate with the skills needed for a successful career in emergency planning and disaster management and response, either in the governmental or non-governmental sectors, anywhere in the world. You'll also get transferable skills in project planning, reporting, data analysis and communication, putting you in a strong position to pursue a career in other industries.

Earth systems and environmental sciences at the University of Portsmouth is ranked 4th of all post-1992 universities for research quality in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021.

The School of Environment, Geography and Geosciences offers a limited number of scholarships for international postgraduate students.

Eligibility This course accepts UK, EU, and international students.

Course highlights

Learn new skills including disaster risk reduction techniques and mapping using Geographical Information Systems (GIS), GPS and remote sensing technologies

Be supported by expert staff and researchers who are active in the field, with extensive industrial and consultancy experience working for government agencies, businesses, the United Nations and NGOs

Have the opportunity to complete a work placement with an emergency planning, crisis management or disaster response organisation and complete a personal project based on your work experience

Take part in study visits and field training with UK emergency services, the military and NGOs

Careers and opportunities

When you graduate, you'll have the knowledge and practical skills needed for a career in the emergency planning, crisis management or disaster response sectors anywhere in the world. The research and analytical components of the course, will support you in applying research positions, for example at PhD level.

Graduates of this course have gone into areas such as:

Humanitarian agencies and NGOs

Emergency management

Emergency logistics and contingency planning

Flood management

Military-civilian emergency liaisons

(Re)insurance and risk management

Utility companies

Civil defence

Disaster relief

Epidemiology

Graduates of this course have gone onto roles such as:

Built environment lecturer

Auditor

Technical adviser

Emergency planning and resilience officer

Business resistence executive

Catastrophe analyst

Civil contingencies officer

Emergency planning and resilience officer

Policy and international engagement advisor

Career outcomes shown are sourced from the latest available graduate outcome surveys. The data shows career outcomes at 15 months after graduation.

During your course you'll have expert career support from your tutors and our Careers and Employability Centre – which you can access for up to 5 years after you graduate