MSc International Disaster Management

Fees for entry in 2027 have not yet been set. For reference, the fees for the academic year beginning September 2026 were as follows:

• MSc (full-time)
  UK students (per annum): £14,700
  International, including EU, students (per annum): £30,700

The fees quoted above are fully inclusive of tuition, administration and computational costs.

Fees for entry are subject to yearly review. The University reserves the right to increase your tuition fee by up to 7% each year for courses lasting more than one year, including to reflect rising costs associated with delivering our educational and wider student experience. Postgraduate fees information .

Always contact the admissions team if you are unsure which fee applies to your qualification award and method of attendance.

International student CAS deposit

Self-funded international applicants are required to pay a deposit of £2500 towards their tuition fees before a confirmation of acceptance for studies (CAS) is issued. Some applicants will be required to pay a higher deposit. More information on tuition fee deposits .

All students should normally be able to complete their programme of study without incurring additional study costs over and above the tuition fee for that programme. Any unavoidable additional compulsory costs totalling more than 1% of the annual home undergraduate fee per annum, regardless of whether the programme in question is undergraduate or postgraduate taught, will be made clear to you at the point of application. Further information can be found in the University's Policy on additional costs incurred by students on undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes (PDF document, 91KB).

We know that student finance can be complicated. The links below provide further information to help guide you.

• Learn more about - student finance options for UK students.
• Learn more about - fees and finance for international students .
• Graduates of The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University can receive a 10% discount on their master's degree tuition fees as part of our Manchester Alumni Loyalty Discount scheme.

This module seeks to understand how planning and fieldwork can improve our understanding of the environment to create dynamic solutions and ultimately reduce disaster risk. Natural systems are not stable when viewed over timescales of centuries and millennia. Over the last two million years the earth surface has experienced fluctuations and dramatic environmental changes. For the last 5,000 years, however, human impact on the environment has become so influential that it becomes difficult to separate natural process and human activity as agents of environmental change. In the past 200 years the change because of human impact has exposed the population to a variety of environmental hazards. 

This course will give students an understanding of past environmental change and seek to understand how global fluctuations in climate play a significant role in the development of our landscape, creating the conditions for disasters resulting from natural phenomena. It will also seek to introduce major geological and hydrometeorological hazards and show how an understanding of the physical environment can play a role in adaptive capacity and governance through planning and field surveying as tools integral to disaster management.

Note that there will be an additional cost associated with this module that the student will be responsible for. Speak to the course convener for further details.

The course aims to: 

• Develop an understanding of mechanism of global environmental change 
• Develop an understanding of geological and hydrometeorological hazards within their environmental situation. 
• Understand the role of environmental planning process to manage environmental change sustainably. 
• Critically reflect on forms of hazard adaptation and mitigation and their relationship to managing disasters 
• Develop fieldwork skills applied to hazard assessment

Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of: 

• Understand natural cycles in environmental systems / the implications of sudden changes
• Developed understanding of geological and hydrometeorological hazards in locational contexts and the impact of environmental change. 
• Spatial analysis as a mechanism for assessing hazard risk and vulnerability (applied to the UK). 
• Critical understanding of management techniques employed to increase sustainable interaction with environment and manage environmental hazards. 
• Develop an understanding of field techniques to assess environmental hazards in the field, create hazard maps and understand the implications of management.

• Identify and evaluate patterns and trends in spatial data • Investigate dynamic phenomena through interrogation of spatial and temporal data 
• Consider the influence of the physical environment and understand the impact of change on the human environments. 
• Critically analyse the links between geological and hydrometeorological hazards and understand causality in a multi-hazard environment. 
• Apply understanding of environmental principles / hazards in planning to reduce risk and increase sustainability. 

• Analysing environmental data (with simple statistics) / identifying trends / patterns 
• Hazard assessment using maps / field data / secondary sources / constructing hazard maps. 
• Data collection in field environments • Research skills, including planning, prioritisation of tasks, identification and location of sources, critical evaluation of findings 
• Communicating analysis results in the form of map analysis • Participation in online and in-class discussion

• Data analysis and interpretation skills. 
• Experience in using GIS maps. 
• Data collection and interpretation.
• Critical thinking, research and project management skills.
• Skills to help them interpret current and future hazard situations.
• Assessing change (through applied management solutions to hazards).
• Ethical awareness.

Assessment Task	Formative or Summative	Weighting within unit
In class assessment tasks / quizzes and participation in group decision making	Formative	N/A
Fieldwork assessment understanding the environment.  A situational assessment of a practical location with maps / fieldwork reports – commenting on field evidence to assess hazard impact.	Summative	60%
Decision making task Using evidence from secondary data sources and existing literature – a critical review of environmental hazards using hazard matrices for chosen location.  This will be an individual report following the group task	Summative	40%

 

Feedback Method	Formative or Summative
Informal oral feedback during class/labs	Formative
Written feedback hazard decision making exercise returned to students according to SALC guidelines and time limits, using a bespoke rubric (adapted from the HCRI mark scheme – but applicable to learning outcome of project).	Summative
Fieldwork – (formative) verbal fieldwork and guidance given during the course on fieldwork weeks and during fieldwork assessment task.  Summative feedback offered through a bespoke rubric adapted from HCRI mark scheme applicable to learning outcomes of assessment task).	Summative and Formative

 

Brewer, C.A. (2006). Basic mapping principles for visualizing cancer data using geographic information systems (GIS). American Journal of Preventative Medicine, 30(2S): S25-S36.

Canevari-Luzardo, L., Bastide, J.,  Choutet, I., and Liverman, D. (2017) Using partial participatory GIS in vulnerability and disaster risk reduction in Grenada, Climate and Development, 9:2, 95-109, DOI: 10.1080/17565529.2015.1067593 

Cutter, S. (2003). GIScience, disasters, and emergency management. Transactions in GIS, 7(4): 439–445.

Dempsey, C. (2018) GIS Lounge at https://www.gislounge.com/free-gis-books/ (Accessed September 2022)

Esri (2022) Disaster Response Programme Webpage.  Accessed September 2022 at https://www.esri.com/en-us/disaster-response/overview. 

Esri (2022) Emergency and disaster management webpage.  Accessed September 2022 at https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/emergency-management/overview 

Gaillard, J.C., and Pangilinan, M.L.C.J.D. (2010). Participatory mapping for raising disaster risk awareness among the youth. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 18(3): 175-179.

Goodchild, M.F., & Glennon, J.A. (2010). Crowdsourcing geographic information for disaster response: A research frontier. International Journal of Digital Earth, 3(3): 231-241.

Haworth, B.T. (2018). Implications of volunteered geographic information for disaster management and GIScience: A more complex world of volunteered geography. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108(1): 226-240. 

Kelman, I. (2020). Disaster by Choice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Kwan, M-P. (2002). Is GIS for women? Reflections on the critical discourse in the 1990s. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 9(3): 271-279.

Meier, P. (2012). Crisis mapping in action: how open source software and global volunteer networks are changing the world, one map at a time. Journal of Map and Geography Libraries, 8: 89–100.

Mandatory field-based activities with nominal contribution from students.