IMAU colloquium Maarten van Aalst (Climate Centre Red Cross)

Disaster risk management in a changing climate -- bridging science, policy and practice

Maarten van Aalst did his PhD at IMAU in atmospheric science. He is now director of the international Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and part-time professor in climate and disaster resilience at ITC, University of Twente. He is also coordinating lead author in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (for the chapter looking at the “key risks” in the Sixth Assessment Report). In this presentation, he will share some of his experiences working on the interface of climate science, policy and practice, reflecting on how the changing climate is affecting disaster risk and humanitarian response, how climate information across timescales is enabling innovations in disaster risk management, and how international climate policy is responding to these new realities, including insights from the backrooms of UN negotiations (which over time have moved from discussing greenhouse gas mitigation, to adaptation to rising risks, to how we confront the reality of climate loss and damage, and possibly even geo-engineering to fix the climate).