Adam Parr

Adam Parr is an Oxford-based barrister researching law, enterprise, and the environment. His 30-year career has encompassed finance, law, industry, and sport, and he has lived and worked in Japan, South Africa, Australia, and Europe. Between 2006 and 2012 he worked for the Williams Formula One team as chief executive and chairman. Since leaving Formula One, Adam has helped build a number of companies as a VC investor and founder. He chairs Oxford Semantic Technologies and Homeland Conservation, a charitable trust dedicated to accelerating action on climate. He is a member of the Bar of England and Wales and a Business Fellow of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment.

Adam’s doctoral research at UCL was published by Brill as The Mandate of Heaven: Strategy, Revolution, and the First European Translation of Sunzi’s Art of War (1772). He co-authored Total Competition: Lessons in Strategy from Formula One with Ross Brawn.

Adam has published five articles from his doctoral research at Oxford, entitled ‘Strategy and Regeneration in the Seventeenth and Twenty-First Centuries’. The research begins with aspects of the seventeenth-century ‘global crisis’, which attributes social and political convulsions to climate change. Two instances of these events are the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China and the English civil war, both of which occurred in the 1640s. The first of the historical papers examines the Jesuit mission in late Ming China, and the way in which the strategy of Matteo Ricci was shaped by the ecological crisis that he witnessed in Beijing in 1604 and his collaboration with the Chinese reformer Xu Guangqi. The second examines the ideas of Sir Cheney Culpeper, an English Parliamentarian who studied at Hertford in the early 1600s. Xu and Culpeper were both pioneers of agricultural improvement and gave particular attention to soil fertility. Xu linked his work to national security while Culpeper wrote about a range of topics including law, social reform and the natural world. The remaining papers apply themes drawn from the historical cases to the contemporary world, in public law, private law, and agriculture. The overall approach is to identify practical and available ways to address the multiple crises that face the world today, drawing on lessons from the past.

Parr, A. (2023). The laws of nature and the nature of law: insights from an English rebel, 1641–57.

Parr, A. (2023). The Paradox Test in Climate Litigation.

Parr, A. (2024). Policy and law: the case of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. 

Dahlgreen, J., Parr, A. (2024). Exploring the Impact of Alternate Wetting and Drying and the System of Rice Intensification on Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A Review of Rice Cultivation Practices

Parr, A. (2024). Ecological Crisis and Strategy in the Jesuit China Mission

Adam has also contributed to research on strategy for addressing climate change, from political and economic approaches to agroecology:

Carnevale Zampaolo, F. Et al. (2023). Compatibility between Conservation Agriculture and the System of Rice Intensification

Parr A. (2022). Making the Important Urgent: Can climate migration light up the slow-burn politics of the Climate Emergency?

Adams, B., Axelsson K., Parr, A. (2022). The Carbon Club revisited: Harnessing enterprise and trade to decarbonise the global economy.

Parr, A. (2021). Glasgow 2021 – Munich Conference or Finest Hour?