Learn about environmental challenges first-hand on our doorstep in the Lake District
Gain the skills and knowledge to take positive action to tackle environmental challenges
Our world faces many environmental challenges, whether with ongoing climate change, biodiversity loss, uncertain food security, natural hazards or pollution. We need a new generation to understand the urgency of the problem and guide us on a more sustainable trajectory.
With the MSc Environmental Sustainability, you will gain knowledge and first-hand experience of key environmental sustainability challenges, such as the energy transition, food production, flooding and conservation. You will learn their broader social context, how they are defined and monitored and what solutions can be implemented at a local level. Taught by our world-leading experts, you will discover how both problems and solutions can be scaled up from the local to the global, unlocking the potential to seed transformative change. The skills you will gain match those being sought by a growing number of employers across the public and private sectors and will equip you to make a difference.
Who is the programme for?
For recent graduates or professionals who want to gain expert knowledge and understanding of sustainability; who want to show leadership in protecting and restoring our environment; and who want to progress their career by fostering a passion for improving livelihoods.
Looking ahead to employability
This programme will provide training in techniques such as sustainability assessment, carbon accounting, institutional analysis, systems thinking and policy evaluation. Throughout this degree, you will also:
Develop your research, writing and communication skills
Gain skills in communicating to varied audiences
Develop important interpersonal skills, such as negotiation and diplomacy
What to expect
You will develop your own specialist subject knowledge and skills in relation to the meaning, interpretation and application of sustainability concepts in different local, national and international contexts.
Through a series of core and optional modules, you will explore alternative theories and perspectives of environmental sustainability. By engaging in constructive debates, assessing policies and evaluating the success of new initiatives in relation to climate, energy, water and land, you will develop a deep and critical understanding of the field.
Thanks to Lancaster’s surroundings, including the English Lake District, there is a rich variety of environmental case studies on our doorstep. This means you will gain first-hand experience of ongoing environmental sustainability controversies, challenges and initiatives. Examples include lake pollution at Windermere, habitat restoration and rewilding initiatives, the energy transition from coal mines to renewables and innovative waste management schemes.
3 things we’d like you to know
Our internationally renowned experts share both a global vision and rich knowledge of our own local environmental landscape, being situated on the doorstep of the English Lake District – a UNESCO World Heritage Site that continues to inspire new ideas around the relationship between humanity and its environment
What we teach is interdisciplinary. We blend academia, research, public policy and industry to bring you the most up to date perspectives, delivering a master’s that opens career options
As a student, you are part of Lancaster Environment Centre. It’s a welcoming community of researchers, scientists and industry professionals working to address the many environmental challenges facing the world
Flexible study options
Study alongside work and other commitments by taking this course on a part-time basis. Running over two years, you can choose from a selection of our modules each year.
We'll liaise with you over your schedule and choice of optional modules, ensuring you successfully balance your commitments alongside our Master’s programme. This includes the possibility to complete all taught modules in the first year, before undertaking the dissertation in the second year.
Interested in master's-level study with us? Fill in our form and we will keep you up to date with course information, events and open days.
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Careers
Sustainability is a major area of employment growth as international organisations, governments, public agencies, private corporations and communities all over the world adopt targets, develop strategies and commit to the implementation of global agreements and the achievement of sustainable development goals (SDGs).
Graduates of the MSc Environmental Sustainability will be open to career opportunities in a wide variety of fields, including professional roles in:
International relations
Government
Business
NGOs
Community organisations
Roles may include:
Sustainability officer
Environmental consultant
Scholarships for 2026 entry
We are delighted to offer a selection of scholarships for taught master’s programmes in the Faculty of Science and Technology for 2026 entry. These scholarships are awarded to students studying the programme on a full-time basis.
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Students from Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey or Vietnam
Your qualifications
Programme cost without scholarship
International Regional Scholarship or India Scholarship
Lancaster Environment Centre features state-of-the-art teaching laboratories and specialist facilities, including dedicated spaces for Environmental Chemistry, Noble Gas analysis, plus Water and Soil Science.
Research Facilities
We offer a diverse range of research facilities to support your work, from glasshouses and controlled-environment plant growth rooms to solar domes and a weather station at our Hazelrigg field site and telemetered research catchments. Our facilities are complemented by advanced equipment such as our Mass Spectrometry facility, X-ray CT-Scanner and Magnetometer.
Local Environment
Our exceptional local surroundings ¨C ranging from coasts and lakes to forests, farms and urban environments ¨C provide a living laboratory for hands-on learning, helping you develop practical skills with global relevance.
Study Spaces
Alongside a range of study areas across campus, our atrium offers a bright, modern environment designed for collaboration and independent work. Filled with natural light and greenery, it¡¯s a welcoming space for students and staff to meet, study and relax.
Data Resources
Dedicated support staff with expertise in GIS, statistics, modelling and programming are on hand to help you build advanced data and digital skills. We also have a cutting-edge data immersion suite that¡¯s used in our teaching.
Entry requirements
Academic requirements
2:2 Hons degree (UK or equivalent) in a subject with a component of Natural or Physical Sciences, e.g. Environmental Science, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Ecology or similar.
We may also consider non-standard applicants, for example where the degree subject does not include a component of Natural or Physical Sciences, but the applicant has considerable work experience or similar training related to Environmental Sustainability. Please contact us for information.
English language requirements
We require an IELTS (Academic) Test with an overall score of at least 6.5, and a minimum of 6.0 in each element of the test.
If you are thinking of applying to Lancaster and you would like to ask us a question, complete our?enquiry form?and one of the team will get back to you.
Delivered in partnership with Lancaster International Study Centre, our one-year tailored pre-master's pathways are designed to improve your subject knowledge and English language skills to the level required by a range of Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é master's degrees. Visit for more details and a list of eligible degrees you can progress onto.
Course structure
We continually review and enhance our curriculum to ensure we are delivering the best possible learning experience, and to make sure that the subject knowledge and transferable skills you develop will prepare you for your future. The University will make every reasonable effort to offer programmes and modules as advertised. In some cases, changes may be necessary and may result in new modules or some modules and combinations being unavailable, for example as a result of student feedback, timetabling, Professional Statutory and Regulatory Bodies' (PSRB) requirements, staff changes and new research. Not all optional modules are available every year.
Core
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Take a critical, yet hands-on approach to exploring the role of eco-innovation as a pathway towards sustainable development.
Through action-learning, you will identify and address complex real-world sustainability challenges by developing your own eco-innovation proposals – viable ideas with the potential to reduce human impact on the environment whilst simultaneously delivering the economic and social ambitions of the global sustainable development agenda.
Working in small teams, you will combine key sustainability concepts and business planning approaches to develop effective eco-innovations. Throughout, you will gain valuable transferable skills including team working, problem analysis and framing, and effective oral and written communication to professional and non-academic audiences.
By the end of the module, you will be able to demonstrate a critical understanding of the forefront of eco-innovation for sustainable development, along with practical skills and increased confidence to help you drive change in real world professional environments.
Through this module, you will explore the shift in humanity’s relationship to the living world and its irreducible, but novel and creative, ‘global’ dimensions of environmental sustainability.
Confronted by unprecedented global environmental challenges, the current response is too superficial and slow. Addressing these problems demands acknowledging their multidimensional nature by situating them in regard to other extraordinary global challenges: socio-technical, cultural, geo-political. Indeed, pressing issues of ‘global’ environmental sustainability are inseparable from an ongoing, turbulent process constructing the ‘global’ – even the ‘planetary’ – as a new horizon of collective action and responsibility
Starting with China’s ‘ecological civilisation’, you will then rethink sustainability from other perspectives from across the world (e.g. south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America) and diverse sectors of society.
Altogether, this requires profound transformation of multiple core concepts of socio-environmental understanding and ways of thinking, including integration of worldviews beyond dominant Western perspectives.
This field-based, interdisciplinary module puts you at the heart of environmental sustainability case studies right on our doorstep in Lancaster. These may include:
Pollution at Windermere
Habitat restoration in the Cumbrian Lake District
The energy transition from coal mines to renewables
Innovative waste management schemes
Local food initiatives
With each case study, our academic and research staff work alongside external stakeholders in the identification, assessment, and remediation of environmental challenges.
Our most pressing environmental sustainability challenges include biodiversity loss, climate change, waste and pollution management, uncertain food security and dwindling resources. There is an ever-increasing demand for graduates versed in these complex issues, whose critical thinking and original, creative problem-solving can make a difference.
You’ll gain both first-hand knowledge relevant to careers in environmental sustainability, and experience in effective communication that cuts across disciplinary boundaries and brings together the University, the private sector, and the wider public.
The dissertation allows you to conduct an independent research project that is at the forefront of the discipline, focusing on a specific topic relevant to your degree programme and interests. Throughout, you will receive one-to-one support from an academic.
This is the largest piece of work that you will complete during your degree and depending on your subject area, will enable you to develop skills including:
Formulating a research question
Contextualising it within research literature
Identifying and using appropriate research methods and techniques to address your question
Collecting and analysing data
Interpreting and communicating your findings
You will be expected to present your findings in an extensive report akin to a research paper. In this, you will demonstrate your ability to conduct rigorous, independent research whilst working effectively with others, attributes valued by future employers.
Optional
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Global food security means ensuring that everyone, everywhere, always has access to an affordable supply of safe and nutritious food. Today, up to a billion people remain undernourished, while many others face health issues linked to over-consumption. This interdisciplinary module explores the wide range of local and global factors that influence food availability, accessibility and utilisation. You’ll examine what makes a diet healthy and how access to key nutrients can be improved, for example through fish consumption or crop biofortification. The module also looks at how climate change affects food production, by influencing key biological processes like photosynthesis and reproductive development. You’ll explore the complex interplay between food, water and energy security, and assess the environmental footprint of the global food system, recognising the diverse needs and priorities of local communities who depend on food-producing regions.
Discover research advances in the field of ecology and conservation that provides key skills for working in the era of big data. You will be taught by world-leading researchers who are experts in biodiversity from coral reefs to tropical forests and freshwater lakes, ensuring deep understanding of how data science can generate actionable insights for global conservation. Throughout the module, you will understand the principles behind data science tools and techniques at the forefront of developing both fundamental understanding of the natural world and urgent solutions to the global biodiversity crisis.
Explore debates around ‘Environment’ and ‘Development’ through a critical geographical lens. Trace the evolution of discourse at intersection of these issues, movements and policies, critically situating notions such as sustainable development against the backdrop of changing geographies of global inequality.
You will draw on critical environmental studies, political ecology and post-development, as you tackle themes that include climate politics, rural development and food sovereignty, neoliberal conservation approaches and their discontents, indigenous knowledges, environmental justice movements, and post-growth approaches.
Through a combination of lectures and workshop activities, gain the necessary insights and theoretical tools for understanding critical debates around environment and development, while also training how to construct reasoned arguments through critical evaluation of evidence, understanding theory-practice relationships, and writing in an academic register.
Develop a critical understanding of the core concepts, tools and strategies used in managing natural resources and the environment. This module places strong emphasis on tackling the complexity, uncertainty and conflict that often characterise real-world environmental challenges. You’ll explore a range of management approaches suited to rapidly changing or ‘turbulent’ conditions and examine contemporary environmental issues through both academic and policy lenses. By engaging in constructive debate, you’ll refine your ability to evaluate competing arguments and evidence, and demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of alternative management frameworks.
How do we make the decisions that will stop climate change, reverse the biodiversity crisis, keep our rivers clean and cope with a host of other environmental issues while providing the jobs, houses, renewable energy and other things we need for a high quality of life? This module will introduce you to the fast-moving world of environmental decision making through Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and the new approach of Environmental Outcome Reports (EORs). We take a practical approach, including site visits, to see how information is gathered and processed on plans, programmes and projects that may have a significant effect on the environment, and we explain the process, law, and key players right through to a decision. This practical approach helps you to gain confidence so that you’re ready to create and present a case either for or against a scheme.
We introduce you to the fundamental principles of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing and demonstrate how these complementary technologies may be used to capture/derive, manipulate, integrate, analyse and display different forms of spatially-referenced environmental data. We blend theory-led lectures with hands-on practical sessions using state-of-the-art software. Alongside core subject knowledge, you'll build transferable skills in synthesising geographical data, developing problem-solving strategies, managing your time effectively and presenting analysis through innovative graphical formats.
How are we transforming the way we supply and use energy to achieve our climate targets? On this cross-disciplinary module, you will look at the major changes underway within our energy system.
Examine decarbonisation pathways in electricity, transport and heat, whilst considering supply and demand dynamics and carbon removal. As part of this, you will investigate real-world challenges at the forefront of the discipline, including how to govern the energy system, economics, societal engagement, and energy security. You will gain real-world insight into complex related issues via interactions with energy professionals, using the University energy system as a case study.
Chemical contamination is one of the ten ‘planetary boundaries’, which, according to some of the world’s most eminent scientists, should not be crossed. The reasons are self-evident; a contaminated world is an unsafe world – for society and the environment. Even the most advanced nations suffer, directly or indirectly, from pollution, whether the source is thousands of kilometres away or just down the street.
Through a combination of lectures and workshop-based activities, you will gain an understanding of the scale of the pollution problem, the fate, behaviour and impact of pollutants in the environment, especially in terrestrial systems, the processes developed to assess the risk and potential impact of pollution, and how we use scientific understanding to reduce the impact of pollution on the environment and society.
The knowledge and skills that you will gain from this module will support your ambitions for further research or employment in the regulatory and private sectors.
Through a combination of lectures, workshop and field-based activities, you will gain a ‘whole system view’ that cuts across disciplines. With a foundation in ongoing research, this will enable you to refine your skills in critical thinking and creative problem solving.
Your new knowledge and skills will provide a springboard for further study or employment focused on a major societal challenge.
In times when hope and fear about the environmental crisis alternate in our minds, when social and political change play havoc with our interpretation of the historic worlds we inhabit, it is crucial that we examine critically and creatively the ways and means by which such a crisis has come into existence. To do so, this module builds bridges across disciplines.
This module combines a place-based approach (Lancaster, the Morecambe Bay, and the Lake District) and an analytical focus centred on the dissonance and convergence of temporal scales. We seek to answer two questions in close dialogue with students:
To what extent is the dissonance between the different timescales of the Earth system, the social and built environment, and the human imagination a contributing factor to political inaction and cultural indifference?
In what ways can we better integrate these timescales while retaining the rigour, criticality, and creativity of the disciplines used to study each?
The module will explore topics such as tidal systems, coasts and estuaries; floods; the rise, fall and rebirth of particular narratives of change; ruins and memory; risk and CO2 trading; glacial archaeology and informality and hope.
Our world is facing an ever-increasing number of global environmental challenges. This engaging module examines the international legal response to those challenges. It delves into the socio-economic, political and scientific implications of environmental problems and, in doing so, invites you to assess their impact on law and policy-making.
The module focuses on contemporary environmental problems such as:
Climate change
Marine pollution
The protection of international watercourses, fisheries and biodiversity
The relationship between trade and the environment
You will assess the law’s strengths and weaknesses in regulating each of these issues.
An introduction to advanced research methods and approaches in the social sciences, with a particular focus on qualitative research methods. This module will introduce you to new ways of conducting and thinking about academic research. You will explore the process of independent research, from framing the questions that are asked about the world – and the practical and political drivers behind this – to considering how to plan ethical research.
You will explore a broad range of approaches to generating data, including both conventional and unconventional social science methods. Expect rigorous theoretical discussion, based in deep engagement with the literature, paired with engaging hands-on opportunities to put these concepts into practice. You will also look beyond research at academic communication and consider ways of reaching the public with outputs from your work.
Fees and funding
We set our fees on an annual basis and the 2027/28
entry fees have not yet been set.
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There may be extra costs related to your course for items such as books, stationery, printing, photocopying, binding and general subsistence on trips and visits. Following graduation, you may need to pay a subscription to a professional body for some chosen careers.
Specific additional costs for studying at Lancaster are listed below.
College fees
Lancaster is proud to be one of only a handful of UK universities to have a collegiate system. Every student belongs to a college, and all students pay a small College Membership Fee which supports the running of college events and activities. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
For students starting in 2026, the one-time fee for undergraduates is £40. For postgraduate students, the one-time fee is £15. Students on some distance-learning courses are not liable to pay a college fee.
Computer equipment and internet access
To support your studies, you will also require access to a computer, along with reliable internet access. You will be able to access a range of software and services from a Windows, Mac, Chromebook or Linux device. For certain degree programmes, you may need a specific device, or we may provide you with a laptop and appropriate software - details of which will be available on relevant programme pages. A dedicated IT support helpdesk is available in the event of any problems.
The University provides limited financial support to assist students who do not have the required IT equipment or broadband support in place.
There is no application fee if you are applying for postgraduate study starting in 2026 or 2027.
Paying a deposit
For some of our courses you will need to pay a deposit to accept your offer and secure your place. We will let you know in your offer letter if a deposit is required and you will be given a deadline date when this is due to be paid.
The fee that you pay will depend on whether you are considered to be a home or international student. Read more about how we assign your fee status.
If you are studying on a programme of more than one year’s duration, tuition fees are reviewed annually and are not fixed for the duration of your studies. Read more about fees in subsequent years.
The Peter Vincent prize rewards Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é final year geography students applying for one of LEC’s taught Master’s degrees. You may be eligible for a prize of £1500.
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If you are a Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é final year geography student applying for one of LEC’s taught Master’s degrees, you may be eligible for a prize of £1500. For each of our Master's degrees, we will award the prize to the graduate with the highest overall mark in either geography, human geography, or physical geography. That’s six prizes in total that may be awarded.
You don’t have to do anything. Once you have secured your place on your chosen LEC Master’s, you will automatically be considered for the prize and notified if you are successful.
Important information
The information on this site relates primarily to the stated entry year and every effort has been taken to ensure the information is correct at the time of publication.
The University will use all reasonable effort to deliver the courses as described, but the University reserves the right to make changes to advertised courses. In exceptional circumstances that are beyond the University’s reasonable control (Force Majeure Events), we may need to amend the programmes and provision advertised. In this event, the University will take reasonable steps to minimise the disruption to your studies. If a course is withdrawn or if there are any fundamental changes to your course, we will give you reasonable notice and you will be entitled to request that you are considered for an alternative course or withdraw your application. You are advised to revisit our website for up-to-date course information before you submit your application.
More information on limits to the University’s liability can be found in our?legal information.
Our Students’ Charter
We believe in the importance of a strong and productive partnership between our students and staff. In order to ensure your time at Lancaster is a positive experience we have worked with the Students’ Union to articulate this relationship and the standards to which the University and its students aspire. Find out more about our? Charter and student policies.