His research on field expeditions in the Sahel,[6] Tibesti, the Kalahari[7] and the Ethiopian Rift established the scale of climate change on African desert margins.

In the early 1970s, when international attention was focused on the African Sahel by the tragedy of drought and famine, Grove's research found a new and important policy audience, challenging glib Malthusian arguments about population growth and ‘desertification’.

Grove's work with Oliver Rackham on the environmental history of Crete and Mediterranean Europe casts doubt on the common conception of the region as a 'Lost Eden', a formerly fertile landscape that has been progressively degraded and desertified by human mismanagement since antiquity.

[8] They argue that environmental determinist notions of a lost Mediterranean Paradise originated in the failure of the landscape to measure up to the imaginary past idealised by artists, poets and scientists of the Enlightenment.

This produced 'humanised' landscapes with resilient ecological systems able to accommodate a range of human activities as well as climatic extremes, with the diversity seen as typical of Mediterranean Europe in modern times.

The real threat to Mediterranean landscapes, they argue, is now posed by overdevelopment of coastal areas, poor water management, abandonment of the mountain regions and the further loss of traditional agricultural occupations.

He was among the trustees of the Jean Grove Trust, a small Catholic charity based in Cambridge which funds the education of children in Ethiopia through direct links with four schools in different parts of the country.