Julia Meaton

Julia is a Senior Lecturer in the Business School, and course leader for the MSc in Risk, Disaster and Environmental Management . She joined the Business School in 2000, but had already been employed at the University in the School of Applied Sciences as Senior Lecturer in Geography since 1994. Prior to that Julia worked as Research Fellow at Wye College (formerly a college of London University, now part of Imperial College). She studied her PhD at The University of Plymouth, completing her thesis in 1990.

Julia’s specific areas of expertise are community sustainability, disaster and emergency management, social enterprise, land use and transport planning.

Her research focuses on the development of sustainable and resilient communities, particularly in emerging or developing economies and she has several live research projects in Ethiopia, Zambia and Jordan. Julia is involved in two forest governance projects in Ethiopia, one explores the potential of non-timber forest products to support vulnerable forest communities and the other, linked project, concerns the sustainable management of coffee forests in Ethiopia. In Zambia, Julia is exploring the charcoal value chain to identify more sustainable methods of charcoal production and use. Linked to this is a project on the development and potential of biodiesel (from recycled oil) in Zambia.

She is currently developng a Jordanian project on the vulnerability of long term Palestinian refugee camps which is the result of a link between two Universities in Jordan where two of her successful PhD students are employed. This research is linked to Julia’s growing interest in disaster and emergency management.

Julia has also been involved in research in social enterprise and have supervised several PhD students in this area. This is an evolving area in emerging and developing nations that she is interested in developing.