Surface and ground water contamination has raised serious concerns and grabbed the worlds attention significantly in last few decades. There are reports suggesting serious problems associated with Australian inland water. The groundwater pollution in Australia may become a more serious issue in the future as learnt from the experience from Europe and North America. In-order to remediate the polluted surface and groundwater, several techniques such as chemical oxidation, air stripping, wet air oxidation etc. has been developed and commercially applied. In the latest developments, a noble technique of combined adsorpiton and oxidation has been proposed. In the current study, pollutant degradation by combined adsorption and oxidation is carried out by utilizing cobalt loaded activated carbon as the catalyst. Several phenolic pollutants are immobilised on activated carbon and simultaneously oxidised in the presence of cobalt and sulphate radical. The supported catalyst was synthesised by impregnating cobalt into the pores of a commercial activated carbon. It was further characterized by various techniques like XRD, SEM, TEM, FTIR, TPR etc to identify the structural and chemical properties of the support and the catalyst. The supported catalyst was tested for phenol oxidation in aqueous solution along with sulphate based oxidant (peroxymonosulphate) at various conditions to evaluate its performance. Complete oxidation of the contaminant is achieved by using a small quantity (100-200 mg) of catalyst. The catalyst stability test reveals partial leaching of cobalt from the support thereby reducing the oxidation efficiency after multiple usage.