We live in a fast-changing world in which millions of people have at their fingertips technologies unknown 20 years ago. The benefits these technologies promise - improved healthcare, faster communications, easy access to information - are huge.

While scientific advances have brought us great benefits, the world's expanding population and its growing use of technology have made inroads into our planet's natural resources; habitats and biodiversity have been lost and ecosystems altered. Greenhouse gases have caused the climate to change in ways that could prove irreversible. Cambridge moves forward: climate change, conservation, sustainability, policy-making.

Cambridge is tackling climate change head on, with 88 research groups into the environment harnessing expertise across many disciplines: physics, biology, environmental sciences, economics and social sciences. For example, shared knowledge between palaeontologists, archaeologists and geologists is helping to build up a picture of how the world's climate has changed over millennia and how its ecosystems have adapted to successive waves of warming and cooling.

Sustainable management of water resources is a pressing issue worldwide. In many countries, the question of water management is made complex by political and environmental factors as well as environmental issues. Developing strategies that address such problems entails well-informed research by scientists whose work provides a solid foundation for policy-making.