News

What has happened at TRANSCEND?

27/11/2024
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.
30/10/2024
On October 30th 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!
20/12/2023
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.
26/11/2023
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.
20/11/2023
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.
19/10/2023
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!
13/10/2023
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.
01/10/2023
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.
26/03/2023
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.
15/01/2023
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.
25/11/2022
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.
22/11/2022
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.
12/07/2022
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.
09/05/2022
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!
05/11/2021
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.
01/10/2021
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!
01/09/2020
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!
01/03/2020
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.
15/11/2019
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.