About the Society
Need to know
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) is the UK’s learned society for geography and professional body for geographers. We are also a membership organisation and a registered charity.
The Society was founded in 1830 to advance geographical science and this remains our core purpose. We achieve this through supporting geographical research, education, and fieldwork and expeditions, as well as by advocating on behalf of the discipline and promoting geography to public audiences.
We value our independence as well as the breadth of our activities that support the understanding of the world’s people, places and environments. Everyone with an enthusiasm for geography, travel and exploration is welcome to join.
A message
From the President
Over the last year, the Society’s staff team has been implementing the recommendations that came out of the Council’s strategic review. The review concluded that while the existing strategy remained fit for purpose, a number of investments were needed to ensure the Society can achieve the impact we want to.
Among these investments has been a research project that has enabled the Membership and Communications teams to better understand what our existing members value about the Society and how we can use this to find and attract new members. Many of you will have been involved in the research element of the project – thank you – and I hope all of you will begin to see the impact of the changes suggested as a result of the research over the coming months and years.
We are also investing in a new Deputy CEO role to drive forward fundraising and commercial plans, and support strategy implementation. I very much hope that someone will be in post this autumn.
I look forward to meeting many of you at this year’s AGM, medals and awards celebration, and annual reception on Monday 2 June. Before then, if you are a Fellow or Associate Fellow, please do consider nominating yourself or someone else for election to our Council. We are looking for a diversity of experience, genders, ethnicities, and ages for the vacant roles. All details are on the website, please contact the Director’s Office if you have questions.
Image credit: Lucy Pope
Society
News
Collections preservation
Among the Society’s treasures are 10 albums of watercolour images created by Victorian naval surgeon, John Linton Palmer.
One of the albums, recording a visit to Rapa Nui, has recently been repaired and conserved thanks to a generous grant from the Geographical Club and a legacy gift in the will of Society Fellow Anne Shirley.
National Lottery Open Week
Engage with our Collections in a meaningful and thought-provoking way, and discover what they can tell us about 500 years of geography, travel and exploration. Join us on Monday 17 March during National Lottery Open Week for an in-person guided tour as we delve into the stories, contexts and interpretations of the objects on display throughout Lowther Lodge.
Recent honours
Congratulations to our Fellows and Members recognised in recent honours including Hari Budha Magar MBE, David Mearns OBE, and Matthew Christian Metcalfe ONZM.
Corporate supporters
Rolex UK have renewed their Corporate Benefactor support for a further three years, demonstrating their long-term commitment to enabling public access to our Collections and supporting conservation. Silversea have also renewed their Corporate Business Membership for a further three years, engaging us to provide informative enrichment materials for their cruise itineraries.
Image credit: RGS-IBG
New membership card for 2025
Elrea Song's Combing the Sea, Combing Peace has been selected to feature on the 2025 Society membership card – our first 100% recycled and recyclable paperboard card. The image series features eight people, including the photographer's nieces, who spent a day collecting rubbish from the ocean, which was then rearranged to create emotive sculptural scenes. The litter collected comes from various countries, highlighting how interconnected we are through our environment.
Donations made easy
We’ve recently installed a digital donation station at our Exhibition Road entrance to make it easy for visitors to donate. Growing donation income from visitors to the Society will help secure the future of our charitable work to share our Collections, engage the next generation of geographers, and maintain our strong voice in advocating for the crucial role of geography.
Land Rover corporate support
We are very pleased that our longest serving Corporate Benefactor, Land Rover, have renewed their support of the Society for another year.
Image credit: Combing the Sea, Combing Peace by Elrea Song
Education
News
Competition winners
Our judges selected 16 young people from the Young Geographer of the Year competition 2024 entries for special recognition, with two winners and two highly commended entries selected for each age category. This year’s winners of the Choose geography themed competition are Aarav Kumar from Queen Elizabeth’s School in Barnet, Bella Stewart from Walhampton School in Lymington, Aksh Rawal from Wilson’s School in Wallington, Libby Hudson from Putney High School in London, Thomas Hurley from Diss High School in Norfolk, Audrey King from Downe House in Berkshire, Zoe Parker from Rugby High School in Warwickshire, and Myrto Kasselaki from Berlin Metropolitan School in Germany.
The recipient of the 2024 Rex Walford Award for lesson plans and accompanying resources linked to the Young Geographer of the Year theme is Beatrice Spicer from Orleans Park School.
The 2024 School Essay Competition, organised in partnership with the Financial Times, asked students to answer the question: Drawing on information from your daily life, what sustainability action points would you prioritise? Santiago Souto from Hastings School in Madrid was selected as the most outstanding entry to include key ideas, with justifications and reference to the FT and other sources.
Image credit: James Tye
Teacher conference
The Society is excited to be working closely with the Geographical Association on an upcoming joint professional development event for teachers – the Festival of geography. Taking place this coming June at the Society in London, the event will be a celebration of excellent geography from inspiring speakers and will showcase creativity, fieldwork, careers education and support subject knowledge development.
Jewel of Arabia
The Jewel of Arabia expedition took place earlier this year with the aim of spotlighting inspiring people, places and stories of Oman’s green transition. From 6 January to 3 February it followed the route taken by British explorer Bertram Thomas in 1928 from Ras Al Hadd, the most easterly point of the Arab world, along the coast to Salalah, the second largest city in Oman. As a partner, the Society produced a range of educational resources as the team made their way along the route, passing through, or close to, many of Oman’s biodiversity hotspots.
The resources, including an ArcGIS StoryMap, focus on KS2, KS3 and A Level, while also being relevant to wider audiences, such as young Omanis, considering working in industries using green skills. To encourage and support use of the resources, the Society’s Education team are working with the British School Muscat to provide online training tailored to schools in the Middle East and British schools overseas, as well as schools in the UK.
Image credit: RGS-IBG
From the field
News
Fieldwork Apprenticeships
The deadline for this year’s Fieldwork Apprenticeships on 1 April is fast approaching. The scheme enables first year undergraduate students, who would not otherwise have the opportunity, to participate in an overseas fieldwork project led by an academic member of staff at their university this summer. Recent Apprenticeships have seen students join teams studying glaciers and hydropower in the Alps through to atmospheric processes using weather balloons in Zambia.
Journey in audio
The Society’s new small group workshop, taking place this spring, will provide professional training and access to high-quality equipment for those going into the field in 2025, supporting the documentation of their travel, fieldwork or research expedition through audio recorded in the field. Look out for their stories across the Society’s channels later in the year.
Ran and Ginny Fiennes Award
The Society has taken on the important grant awarding work of the Transglobe Expedition Trust and is supporting the next generation of travellers and expeditioners through the Ran and Ginny Fiennes Award. The Awards will be given in support of humanitarian, scientific or educational projects which follow in the Transglobe Expedition’s tradition of challenge and perseverance, and enable those benefiting from the Award to achieve worthwhile ambitions and inspire others to do likewise. Applications for projects taking place in 2026 are welcomed ahead of the deadline of 15 September 2025.
Image credit: Jason Nix/Unsplash
Research and higher education
News
New journal appointments
We are pleased to announce a number of new editorial appointments for the Society’s journals.
In The Geographical Journal, a new team has been appointed: Professor Peter Hopkins (Newcastle University), Professor Paul Milbourne (Cardiff University), Professor Joanna Bullard (Loughborough University), Dr Rebecca Collins (University of Chester) and Dr Trivik Verma (University of Bristol).
In Area, we welcome three new editors: Dr Eli Lazarus (University of Southampton), Professor Mary Lawhon (University of Edinburgh) and Professor Jonny Darling (Durham University).
In Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, we have appointed six new members to the Editorial Board: Dr Sabina Lawreniuk (University of Nottingham), Dr Francesco Chiodelli (Università degli Studi di Torino), Dr Ida Andersson (Örebro University), Dr Ye Junjia (Nanyang Technological University), Dr Eloisa Berman-Arévalo (Universidad del Norte), and Dr George Adamson (Kings College London).
We are very grateful to all of our outgoing editors and board members for their hard work and strategic direction throughout their tenures.
All Society Fellows have free access to our journals via our website.
Image credit: James Tye
Peer review academy
The inaugural RGS-IBG Peer review academy took place from October to December 2024. Twelve postgraduate participants were selected from over 100 applicants to attend workshops and complete a supported practice review. The scheme will run twice a year with the aim of improving the confidence of peer reviewers and quality of reviews in our postgraduate geography community. Please look out for upcoming calls for applications.
Society grants
Each autumn, our Research Groups can apply for funding from the Society to support activities in the upcoming year. The Research Groups bring together active researchers and those with a professional interest in a particular aspect of geography and related disciplines. We have now awarded 10 groups / projects grants this year, which are enabling the sharing of expertise and providing support to the wider research community. These grants will be funding academic workshops, travel bursaries, training days, and more.
Image credit: Nando Machado
Professional
News
Undergraduate LinkedIn network
The Society has launched an online network to support students in the transition from university to a career in geography.
The LinkedIn group, for undergraduates and recent graduates, shares resources, opportunities and guest blogs providing insight for early career professionals across the wide range of sectors geography graduates work in. The group seeks to address the challenges of what to do next and how to get there.
CPD for Chartered Geographers
Employers or training providers delivering professional development to geographers are invited to have their professional development activity recognised as contributing towards Chartered Geographer CPD requirements.
The Society offers a CPD mark to recognise activities that support geographers in their professional development, for example in developing the competencies described in the Chartered Geographer framework of competencies, or in teaching skills and knowledge specific to one of geography’s sub-disciplines. The CPD mark can help courses stand out and demonstrates that the content and delivery of the course has been determined suitable for Chartered Geographers and others.
Image credit: Headway/Unsplash
Events
Highlights
Summer events programme
With a stellar line up of regional events and continually growing number of talks on demand, our thoughtful discussions and fascinating lectures are here to inspire you any time, wherever you are.
Our summer regional programme brings you a fantastic range of in-person events, including a guided walk around Brighton’s historic and contemporary LGBTQ spaces, an exploration of the different legal and cultural concepts of an urban common in Norwich, and in Tavistock artist Tony Foster’s discussion on the expeditions he made to paint the three faces of Everest.
Image credit: James Tye
Meet conference chair
Q&A with Professor Patricia Noxolo
This year, the Society’s Annual International Conference will be taking place at the University of Birmingham from 26 to 29 August and is chaired by Professor Patricia Noxolo, who chose the conference theme. We sat down with her to discuss how geographers engage with creativity and her hopes for the conference.
What inspired you to choose creativity as the theme for the conference in 2025?
"I am a geoscientist by training and my research has focused on ancient climates of the Earth, millions of years ago. I have worked on rocks and fossils in the polar regions, which have changed from warm tropical landscapes (even when close to the poles) to the amazing icy worlds that we know today. This has provided me with insight into how our planet might change as our climate warms."
"What kinds of practices (including geographical) do you consider creative?"
Well, there are all sorts of practices that I’d consider to be creative and the theme is geographies of creativity / creative geography so I want to think about geography as a discipline that is creative through the creation of maps and the creation of science of various kinds, the creation of ideas, thinking and imagining and reimagining the connections between post-colonial geographies and development geographies. An example is the connections, and their reimagining, between the poorest places in the world and the wealthiest places in the world. I’m also interested in how a lot of spatial knowledge is not in conventional western geographical containers, but it’s also felt through creative practice, felt through dance or understood and theorised through creative writing.
What do you think the challenges are in thinking about creativity and geography together, if there are any?
I think there are a few actually and I really want to see what people do with it. To be creative requires a certain loosening up, freeing up. I think often there’s a certain tension where capitalism really wants us to be creative, but it also wants us to be docile, and docility is not good for creativity. You need to be able to take risks. You need to be able to say, ‘this could work’. Though creativity is not necessarily innocent. It can be highly complicit with various forms of exploitation and oppression. The flexibility of exploitation is also something that is creative and we need to be aware of how and why it is creative.
How do you hope delegates will connect with Birmingham as a creative place?
I hope geographers will really enjoy being there, that there’ll be some really interesting questions about marginality and typicality, that there’ll be a porousness, that people in the city will also benefit from the conference. I want people in the city to be able to contribute to the conference, they might come and perform, they might tell us about their research and their lives, and that also geographers will go out into the city and find out about them, collaborate, bring them in.
What programme activities are you most looking forward to?
I guess one of the things that I really want to have happen is surprise. For people to surprise me and themselves about what they actually end up doing. We’re going to have to think about the conference space differently; find really creative ways of getting vital messages across.
Image credit: University of Birmingham
The future of education
Geography within curriculum
In autumn 2024, the Government’s review of the existing national curriculum and statutory assessment system in England, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was launched to ensure they are fit for purpose and meeting the needs of children and young people.
After an open call to Society members for thoughts and evidence, we submitted our response, which we believe represents the best interests of the discipline and the views of the Society, our members and education professionals.
In our response, we advocate strongly that the current statutory entitlement to education in geography is a great strength of the English educational system and it must be retained. Geography is the core subject through which young people learn about issues such as globalisation, development, sustainability, resilience, interdependence, inequality and climate change. It fosters curiosity and vital skills of enquiry to better understand, engage with, and operate in the world of today, enabling young people to develop and evaluate potential solutions to pressing global challenges. Geography also equips young people with a range of skills, capabilities, values and behaviours that help them to develop into informed citizens aware and invested in the world in which they live.
The requirement for young people to do fieldwork, to have structured learning in and out of the classroom, and to experience the outdoors, is essential and we argue it must feature at all key stages. We know fieldwork benefits not only learning, by allowing students to connect complex human/environment interactions and geographical concepts with the real world, but also wellbeing by enhancing the personal, social and emotional development of students, alongside their employability.
However, we also recognise that elements of the geography curriculum do need to be updated, notably in terms of topics such as climate change and sustainability, global development, and mapping (and geospatial technologies and analysis). Some of these changes are urgent. At the same time, the curriculum is packed, and the amount of content, especially at GCSE, does need to be reduced to allow integration of up to date content and case studies. There are calls to embed the teaching of climate change across the curriculum which we support, but we continue to stress that climate change education must remain anchored in geography. Geography is unique in its capacity to teach young people about why and how climate change is happening, its impacts on places and people – and how and why these are so uneven – and how these impacts can be mitigated. As a result, a revised geography curriculum must make explicit reference to the climate emergency, to climate action, to climate justice, and importantly to hopeful futures.
Our response reiterates that the current post 16 options for those who take A Levels are too narrow. Importantly, more vocational pathways need to be developed for this stage, with huge potential for opportunities focused on geospatial applications and geographical green skills.
Crucially, we strongly advocate for any new curriculum and assessment framework to be sustainable with respect to its impact on the teaching workforce who will deliver it, and cognisant of the broader context in which education is being delivered. While beyond the scope of this review, we also call for more specialist geography teachers and for teachers (specialist, generalist and non-specialist) to be supported in transitioning to the new curriculum through training and professional development, to ensure the most effective implementation.
We look forward to working with the review panel and other sector bodies in the next phases of the review. Further updates about our advocacy work can be found on our website. If you would like regular updates about our education work sign up to our e-newsletter.
Images credit: James Tye
Geography in practice
Staying connected
Professional development is an unending process of continually improving awareness, skills and competencies to ensure qualifications do not become outdated, while enhancing workplace outcomes and individual career prospects.
In a rapidly evolving professional landscape, geographers face the continual challenge of staying ahead of new technologies and approaches. It has never been more important to connect professional communities that share a common interest so they can exchange knowledge. As the UK’s professional body for geography, the Society is uniquely positioned to bring together experts, industries and tools that foster learning, collaboration, and enhance the long-term professional prospects of people using geographical skills in their work.
The Society’s Geography in practice webinars have been introduced to address the need for professional development events that raise awareness of new ideas, inspire further exploration and bring to the forefront the impact of geographical approaches across industries. These sector specific webinars reveal diverse perspectives and insights from experts, while sharing best practice and identifying shared challenges. As a collaborative forum, they also cultivate strong networks and allow attendees to engage in professional development flexibly.
The benefits of the webinars are wide ranging and they combine several important streams of the Society’s work. They provide recognised CPD that is relevant and collaborative, keep professional geographers informed through real-world case studies that highlight the latest advances, and build meaningful networks by bringing people together from a wide variety of organisations across research and industry.
For the speakers participating in the webinars, they are a welcome opportunity to showcase their work and a platform to invite insightful discussion. Dr Katie Dawson, Co-Founder and Technical Director at EcoSpatial Solutions, an organisation delivering GIS analytics, management, and visualisation to clients, hosted one of our webinars in December 2024 which looked at gathering baseline data and measuring improvements in biodiversity net gain (BNG) accurately in England and Wales. Katie found the joint event with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Canal & River Trust, and Ecospatial Solutions, a mutually beneficial experience.
“The Geography in practice webinar is a great environment for knowledge sharing and professional growth. I personally enjoy sharing my work and experiences; the importance of GIS support for BNG can be so easily overlooked, I truly appreciated the opportunity to demonstrate what’s possible. I then get the benefit of enriching discussions and insights I otherwise would not have had. Attendees benefit from access to innovative ideas, practical applications, and diverse perspectives, regardless of their experience level. Ultimately bridging gaps between academia and industry and empowering participants with tools to address real-world challenges.”
It is clear that exposure to new viewpoints and practices can enrich understanding and spark different approaches to an individual’s work, and the aim of the ongoing Geography in practice series is to encourage this while nurturing a sense of belonging within our communities.
Recordings of all of the previous webinars, including Trajectories of neighbourhood deprivation in England, Mapping underground infrastructure through the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR), and Locally-led humanitarian planning and response… is this the end of international deployments? can be found on our website.
Image credit: Daniil Korbut/Unsplash
Venue hire
A unique exhibition space
Choose the Royal Geographical Society for your 2025 show!
Prominently situated on London’s Exhibition Road, in the heart of South Kensington’s iconic arts and science district, our glass Pavilion offers a versatile space perfect for showcasing a variety of exhibitions and displays.
Take advantage of this well positioned, modern space with optional display systems and join a cohort of talented creatives and image makers to display their work at the Society, next to our own renowned Collections.
The bright, accessible space is available in two week hire slots with one evening access for a private view reception.
Contact us today to discuss how we can meet your needs.
Image credit: James Tye