The TRANSCEND project was well-represented at this year’s Adaptation Futures conference in Christchurch (New Zealand), 13-16 October 2025. At Adaptation Futures, leading scholars and practitioners from across the world working on various topics related to climate change adaptation come together with the shared goal of promoting accelerated and sustainable adaptation. For the TRANSCEND team, Prof. Matthias Garschagen, Dr. Deepal Doshi, and Dr. Jan Petzold presented research on urban adaptation finance as well as challenges for inclusive flood risk reduction in coastal megacities.

Two TRANSCEND members presented some of our research at this year’s Scenarios Forum (16-18 July 2025) in Leeds, United Kingdom: Alexandre Pereira Santos held a presentation on “The Future of Climate Adaptation in Jakarta: Estimating Long-Term Metropolitan Socioeconomic and Urban Challenges Using a Participatory Scenario Approach”; and Jan Petzold presented a poster “Identifying Drivers of Vulnerability Across Scales Through Participatory Downscaling of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways: Insights from Two Global South Megacities”.

In order to complement the TRANSCEND research on the dimensions of exposure and vulnerability, Dr. Jan Petzold adds a social justice lens to the project, with a focus on inclusive adaptation for people with disabilities. In March 2024 and February 2025, he interviewed diverse stakeholders from organisations for people with disabilities, civil society, academia, and local authorities in Mumbai and Jakarta.

Resulting from our research in the Mumbai case study, and co-developed with our local partners from the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, we published a paper presenting the downscaled shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs) for Mumbai in the Nature Partner Journal Climate Action.

On October 30^th 2024, Deepal Doshi, a PhD candidate of the TRANSCEND project, supervised by Prof. Dr. Matthias Garschagen, successfully defended her PhD research titled “Social contracts for adaptation to climate change – Conceptual contributions, methodological innovations, and empirical insights from flood risk management in Mumbai”. Congratulations to Deepal!

A new TRANSCEND paper led by Deepal Doshi was just published in Regional Environmental Change. It presents conceptual work and empirical findings on how actors’ objectives shape how they think about adaptation roles and responsibilities.

The TRANSCEND team held two successful “Future climate risk and adaptation” Workshops with our partners TISS and MMRDA in Mumbai, on 6 & 7 March, and with BRIN in Jakarta on 21 March 2024.

The paper “The role of social identities for collective adaptation capacities – general considerations and lessons from Jakarta, Indonesia” led by Mia Wannewitz and Matthias Garschagen has recently been published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The paper builds on fieldwork in Jakarta and showcases how understanding social identification helps to better assess local collective capacities to adapt.

We had the great pleasure of hosting Dr. Sasha Kosanic from Liverpool John Moores University at LMU. Together with Sasha, we developed a strategy for including a specific focus on people with disabilities within TRANSCEND and discussed the leverage points perspective for research on transformational and just adaptation to climate change.

TRANSCEND researcher Dr. Jan Petzold has been invited to give a keynote speech on “Transformation and Adaptation of Coastal Cities in Small Island States” at the Department of Geomatics, Engineering and Land Management of the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Trinidad. His presentation was the opening for a panel discussion in the context of the World Planning Day and the 40th anniversary of the department.

On October 19th, Mia Wannewitz, a PhD candidate of the TRANSCEND project, successfully defended her dissertation. Mia’s thesis is titled “Understanding collective adaptation to climate change in socio-culturally diverse contexts – General conceptual models and empirical insights from Jakarta”. Congratualations, Mia!

We have a new open access publication in the journal Nature Climate Change, led by Jan Petzold and Matthias Garschagen. The paper “A global assessment of actors and their roles in climate change adaptation” builds on the database of the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative (GAMI) and analyses which actor types are documented in climate adaptation research and which roles they play.

The TRANSCEND team is growing. We welcome Dr Alexandre Pereira Santos as a new postdoctoral researcher. Alexandre recently completed is PhD at the University of Hamburg and has a strong background in analysing multidimensional urban vulnerability. He will support the development and application of our integrative model on diverse urban morphologies and social vulnerabilities under different climate futures.

Together with our partners from BRIN and the surveyors from Datachief, we started a large household survey about flood risks and adaptation in Jakarta.

We have three new publications building on the empirical work in our two case studies. On Mumbai: “Assessing social contracts for urban adaptation through social listening on Twitter” and “Ruptures in perceived solution spaces for adaptation to flood risk” led by Deepal. And on Jakarta: “What makes people adapt together? An empirically grounded conceptual model on the enablers and barriers of collective climate change adaptation“, led by Mia.

The TRANSCEND team went on a combined fieldwork trip to Mumbai and Jakarta and carried out the next steps of our empirical research in the two case study sites.

Three members of the TRANSCEND group recently attended and presented at the American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting held in Denver, Colorado, from 23-27 March 2023. Read our blog entry, where we share our experiences from the conference.

We are pleased to announce a new publication by our TRANSCEND team members Mia and Matthias on collective adaptation to climate change. The article presents a novel framing for analysing how collective adaptation is formed and mobilised in socioculturally diverse settings.

Co-organized with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and kindly hosted by Mumbai Metropolitan Development Authority (MMRDA), the TRANSCEND team held its first scenario workshop in Mumbai on 25 November 2022.

The TRANSCEND team held an important meeting at the newly established Indonesian National Research and Innovation Agency (Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional, BRIN) – the partner for our research in Jakarta – and signed a letter of agreement to kick-start our joint research activities.

The whole TRANSCEND team at LMU joined the final conference of the BMBF young research groups on global change at the Gustav-Stresemann-Institute in Bonn. Along with other 11 research groups, we presented our research with an oral presentation and a poster.

There are two new publications on climate change adaptation and transformation in coastal areas involving several TRANSCEND team members: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14303-w & https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106230

Our new administrative assistant Sheren Leung joined our team at LMU. She has a background as a translator as well as long experience in acadamic administration. Welcome Sheren!

The TRANSCEND team together with its local partners successfully conducted the kick-off workshop in our case study Mumbai.

After revisions, the open access review article “Mapping the adaptation solution space – lessons from Jakarta” (doi: 10.5194/nhess-21-3285-2021) was published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS). In summary, the review of scientific publications on the topic of flooding in Jakarta finds that the literature focuses more strongly on understanding the hazard and assessing the effectiveness of infrastructural adaptation measures, while the analysis of soft adaptation measures such as behavioral change, community organization and preparation or simple early warning structures are not so popular. The review concludes that this bias in the literature has an impact on the adaptation solution space, which represents an important basis for political decision-makers. It might favor the trend of favoring infrastructural solutions over soft adaptation options.

Several TRANSCEND researchers have been involved in this new publication: A systematic global stocktake of evidence on human adaptation to climate change. Nature Climate Change, 11, 989–1000. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01170-y

We now have the postdoctoral researcher position filled by Dr. Jan Petzold. Jan has a background in integrative geography, worked for the Technical Support Unit of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and in the Synthesis Project of Hamburg University’s Cluster of Excellence CLICCS. His research in TRANSCEND focusses on leverage points for transformational and inclusive climate change adaptation in coastal cities. Jan will also take over key coordinating roles of the research activities. Welcome Jan!

We are pleased to fill the third PhD position in the TRANSCEND team at LMU by Veronika Zwirglmaier. Veronika has a background in Environmental Engineering and her research will focus on developming an integrated modelling platform to perform integrated large-scale assessments of flood risk in complex urban environments under future scenarios and adaptation options. Welcome Veronika!

Due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately our planned kick-off workshops in Mumbai and Jakarta this year had to be cancelled and postponed. Also the fieldwork that Deepal and Mia planned to carry out in the two case study sites cannot take place. The team will now develop alternative measures and methods for dealing with this tricky situation.

After starting the TRANSCEND project at United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, the project now has its official launch at the Department of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). Prof. Matthias Garschagen and the two PhD students Deepal Doshi and Mia Wannewitz are looking forward to diving right into the research activities and will be joined by further additions to the team soon.