He further holds a position as an Honorary Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies. His research focuses on social vulnerability and risk governance in the context of natural hazards and climate change impacts, particularly in Asian cities.
Among other functions, Professor Garschagen currently serves as a Lead Author in the IPCC’s upcoming Special Report onOcean and the Cryosphere (SROCC). He also has served as a contributing author in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report and in the writing team of the UN’s New Urban Agenda. Heco-leads the Expert Working Group on Environmental Risks within the German Association of Geographers and the TWIN-SEA expert network on coastal adaptation in Indonesia andSoutheast Asia. He is a member of several editorial boards, including the Journal of Extreme Events and the journal Urban Climate.
Professor Garschagen leads a number of international research projects and his research findings have been published in well-known international journals, e.g., on the need to strengthen resilience in small and mid-sized cities (in Nature); on the relationship between global urbanisation trends and climate change vulnerability (in Climatic Change), the effectiveness of decentralising risk reduction in Vietnam (in HabitatInternational) or on the applicability of urban resilience concepts across different cultural contexts (in Natural Hazards).
Matthias Garschagen holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Cologne, Germany, and has an additional background in Economics and Cultural Anthropology. He received scholarships from the German National Academic Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service.
