Dr Rowan Gard is an environmental social scientist whose work focuses on how people understand and respond to climate change and environmental degradation. She studies the human stories behind the climate crisis—how communities adapt, resist, and create change.

Her research takes her from the coral coasts of Oceania to the river catchments of the UK, exploring what resilience means in practice. Alongside her academic work, Rowan is an Editor for the International Social Science Journal and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Royal Anthropological Institute, and Higher Education Academy.

Before joining King’s College London, Rowan held posts at University College London, and the Universities of Edinburgh, Hawaiʻi, and St Andrews. She has also worked in a number of museums—including the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley—where she created exhibitions linking culture, science, and sustainability.

Rowan co-founded Young Sea Changers Scotland, a youth-led charity working to amplify young voices in marine conservation and policy. She previously served as a Trustee for Friends of the Earth, and has represented Scotland at the People’s Climate Summit during the UN COP.

Her interdisciplinary research and teaching explore climate justice, creative and spiritual approaches to sustainability, and how education can inspire more hopeful futures. Rowan is passionate about teaching the next generation of sustainability leaders and was shortlisted for the 2025 King’s Teaching Excellence Award in the Student Support category.

Qualifications

• Postgraduate Certificate in Philosophical Studies, Pacific Theology College (2024)
• PhD in Environmental Anthropology, University of St Andrews (2019)
• Master of Anthropology (Paleoecology), summa cum laude, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2010)
• BA in Anthropology (Archaeology), magna cum laude, University of California at Davis (2006)

Research

• Climate change and environmental degradation responses, especially in Oceania and the UK
• Education for sustainability
• Deep sea mining and the blue economy in the Pacific
• Climate change activism and environmental campaigning
• Globalization in and of Oceania
• Art as climate change response
• Traditional knowledge and spiritual understandings of nature
• The green economy and greenwashing practices
• Informal education in public spaces, especially museums
• Decolonization in higher education and museums

Rowan’s interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of climate change, sustainability, culture, and multispecies justice in the North and South Seas. Her work examines how communities understand and respond to environmental change through creative, ethical, and place-based practices. Drawing on environmental anthropology, geography, and decolonial thought, she investigates how aesthetics, spirituality, and culture shape collective responses to the climate crisis—and how alternative understandings, temporalities, and solidarities might reframe justice beyond the human. Her academic interests include environmental justice, climate action and adaptation, posthuman ethics, decolonial praxis, and Oceanian epistemologies.

Rowan is especially interested in how the arts and storytelling can serve as catalysts for climate dialogue and imagination, bridging scientific and spiritual ways of knowing. Passionate about fostering critical and creative approaches to ecological futures, she works collaboratively across disciplines and sectors to explore how education, community practice, and public engagement can help cultivate more just and hopeful responses to environmental change.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSG1016 Geography in Action
• 4SSG1008 Geography Tutorials: Critical Thinking and Techniques
• 5ABLLIB2 Space, Power, Agency
• 6SSG0610 Independent Geographical Study
• 6SSG3088 Sustainability in Practice

Postgraduate

• 7SSGN224 Sustainability in Practice
• 7SSGN002/7SSG5002 Practicing Social Research
• 7SSGN070 Internship (Environment and Society)

PhD supervision

Rowan would be happy to supervise PhD students in any of the following areas:

• Artistic and spiritual understandings of climate change
• Nature-focused education
• Sustainability-influenced behaviour modification, and education for sustainability more generally
• The politics and economics of climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction
• Climate change activism, and the environmental movement more broadly

Selected publications

Gard, Rowan et al. (2023). Education for Sustainable Development Report: A Review of the Literature 2015-2022. Advanced Higher Education.

Gard, Rowan et al. (2023). A New Team and Vision of the International Social Science Journal. Editorial in International Social Science Journal. Volume 73: 255-259.

Gard, Rowan (2021). Paddling on Both Sides of the Canoe—Towards an Integration of Science and Spirituality in Climate Change Response [chapter in] Opportunities for Faith-Engaged Approaches to Climate Change Adaptation in the Pacific Islands. (Ed) Nunn, P. Springer Publishing, as part of the Climate Change Management Series.

Gard, Rowan (2018). How $6 trillion of fossil fuel investments got dumped thanks to green campaigners: the Environment & Energy section of The Conversation, republished by Resilience.org and Yahoo News UK.

Gard, Rowan (2018). Welcome to the Age of Sustainable Development? Anthropology Today. Volume 34 (1), 18-19.

Gard, Rowan (2017). Looking for Light on the Dark Side of the American Dream—Exploring the Painful Legacy of Nuclear Colonialism in Paradise: International Journal of Research in Anthropology and Sociology. Volume 3 (4), 32-42.

Gard, Rowan & Veitayaki, Joeli. (2017). In the Wake of Winston—Climate Change, Mobility and Resiliency in Fiji: Disaster Management, 57-68, Ed. C. Brebbia, Wessex Institute Press, Southampton, UK.

Gard, Rowan & Veitayaki, Joeli. (2017). In the Wake of Winston—Climate Change, Mobility and Resiliency in Fiji: International Journal of Safety& Security Engineering. Volume 7 (2), 157-168.

Selected exhibitions

• Cassandra and the Agency of Hope, London and Verona (2025)
• Vital Signs: Another World is Possible at the Science Gallery, London (2024)
• A View from the Pacific at the Church of the Holy Innocents, Epping Forest (2024)
• Time for Actions, Not Words at the Great Hall, King’s College London (2023)
• CASCADE INQUIRY with Superflux at The Exchange, King’s College London (2023)
• Weathervane: We, Not I at the Great Hall, King’s College London (2022)
• Reimaging Museums for Climate Action at the Glasgow Science Centre (2021)
• Moana—The Rising of the Sea at the Wardlaw Museum & Byre Theatre, University of St Andrews (2015) Shortlisted for the Times Higher Education’s Excellence and Innovation in the Arts Award
• Hearst Museum Revitalization Project at the University of California, Berkeley (2013-2014)
• Beauty & Belief: Crossing Bridges with the Arts of Islamic Culture with the Doris Duke Foundation (2012)
• Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape and Islamic Art with the Doris Duke Foundation (2012)
• Pacific Hall Restoration Project at Bishop Museum (2010-2011)
• Voyages of Discovery – The Pacific and its People at Bishop Museum’s Planetarium (2010)

Further details

See Rowan's research profile