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Rebuild or Retreat?

Rebuild or Retreat? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Migration and Mobility in the Global North

April 23 – 24, 2026 | German Historical Institute (GHI) Washington, Washington, D.C.

 

International Conference at the German Historical Institute Washington | Organized by Jana Dunz-Keck (GHI Washington) and Sarah Beringer (GHI Washington) in collaboration with Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania), Andreas Huebner (Kiel University), Max Gruenig (POCACITO Network and Georgetown University, BMW Center for German and European Studies), and Brendan O’Donnell (POCACITO Network and Heinrich Böll Foundation)

Photo Credit: U.S. Army / Patrick Bloodgood

 
 
Conference Venue, Hotel, Directions, and Transportation

Conference Venue

German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW
Washington, D.C. 20009

Hotel

The Normandy Hotel
2118 Wyoming Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20008


Directions from the Dupont Circle Metro stop to the hotel and the GHI Washington


Public Transportation tickets

You can pay your DC Metrorail fare with a contactless credit or debit card using the “Tap. Ride. Go.” system at Metrorail station faregates, which works with physical cards, mobile wallets like Apple Pay or Google Pay, and smartwatches. To use the system, simply tap your contactless card or device on the faregate to enter and tap out to exit, and the fare will be automatically calculated and charged. Please note that “Tap. Ride Go.” currently only works for rides on the DC Metrorail. For Metro parking garages and lots, Metrobus routes, MTA, and partner regional bus providers, use mobile pay or reloadable fare cards to pay for your trips.

Directions from Dulles International Airport, Reagan National Airport, and Union Station to the hotel

FROM: WASHINGTON DULLES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (IAD)

Metrorail – Silver Line

International Airport Dulles (IAD) is metro accessible. Follow airport signs to the metro entrance at Arrival Door 2 and 6. Purchase a SmarTrip Card from machines inside the metro station and take the silver line in the direction of Largo Town Center.Transfer at Metro Center to the red line in the direction of Shady Grove. Exit at the Dupont Circle station. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 8 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place, Leroy Place, and California St.). Turn left into Wyoming Avenue, NW. The Normandy Hotel is located on the left-hand side on Wyoming Avenue. It is a 15-minute walk from the metro station.

FROM: REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT (DCA)

Metrorail – Yellow Line

Reagan National Airport (DCA) is metro accessible. To reach downtown Washington, DC, follow airport signs to the metro entrance, located outside (in front of the airport) on the upper level. Metrorail SmarTrip cards may be purchased from machines at the metro station. Please keep SmarTrip card handy during the ride; you will need it to exit the station. Metrorail hours of operation are weekdays 5:00am until 11:30pm and weekends 7:00am until 3:00am.

Take the yellow line in the direction of Mt. Vernon Sq./Fort Totten to Gallery Place-Chinatown. Transfer to the red line in the direction of Shady Grove to Dupont Circle. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 8 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place, Leroy Place, and California St.). Turn left into Wyoming Avenue, NW. The Normandy Hotel is located on the left-hand side on Wyoming Avenue. It is a 15-minute walk from the metro station.

FROM: UNION STATION

Metrorail – Red Line

Take the red line in the direction of Shady Grove to Dupont Circle. Use the North Exit (Q Street). At the top of the escalator, go straight, cross Q Street and follow Connecticut Avenue for approximately 8 blocks uphill (you will pass Hillyer Place, R Street, S Street, Bancroft Place, Leroy Place, and California St.). Turn left into Wyoming Avenue, NW. The Normandy Hotel is located on the left-hand side on Wyoming Avenue. It is a 15-minute walk from the metro station.

Participant Contact Information

 

Click here to see the password protected information

 
Schedule
Thursday, April 23, 2026

9:00 – 9:15 a.m.

Registration & Welcome

9:15 – 10:30 a.m.

Opening Keynote

Chair: Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University)

Bruce Holsinger (University of Virgina): The Fiction of Unmanaged Retreat

 

10:30 – 11:00 a.m.

Coffee Break

 

11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Panel I: Voices from the Ground: Lived Experience, Heritage, and                                               Displacement

Chair: Rizqa Hidayani (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Wiwandari Handayani (Diponegoro University): (Im)mobility and Environmental Change: Experiences from the Coastal Sinking Cities of the Northern Coast of Java, Indonesia

Laura Otto (University of Würzburg): Contested Shores: Migration, Algae, and the Governance of Newcomers, via Zoom

 

12:15 – 1:15 p.m.

Lunch Break

 

1:15 – 3:00 p.m.

 

Panel II: Governing Climate Mobility: Law, Policy, and Political                                                       Responsibility

Chair: Lindsay Jenkins (Georgetown University)

Hélène Benveniste (Stanford University): Effects of climate on human migration: Empirical evidence, projections, and international policy responses, via Zoom

Kira Vinke (German Council on Foreign Relations, Center for Climate and Foreign Policy): Redrawing Humanity’s Map: How Climate Change Is Shaping Migration

Koko Warner (IOM Global Data Institute (GDI)): Rebuilt or Retreat: Financial Instruments as Signals and Mediators of Habitability



3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Coffee Break

3:30 – 5:15 p.m.

Panel II: Mapping Climate Retreat: Geographies of Risk and Relocation

Chair: Nepomuk Dunz (World Bank)

Claudia Wolff (Kiel University): Managed Retreat as Flood Adaptation: Insights from Managed Retreat Initiatives Across Europe

Felicitas Hillmann (Technical University Berlin): What can we eventually learn from environmental resettlement and relocation concepts for the Global South?

Carolien Kraan (Deltares): Managed Retreat or Meebewegen: Cultural Context Shapes Concepts

 

6:00 p.m.

Conference Reception at the GHI

Second Floor Lobby

 
 
Friday, April 24, 2026


9:00 – 10:00 a.m.

Making Climate Comedy

Chair: Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania)

Patrick Nederkoorn, Comedian and Moderator, via Zoom

10:00 – 10:30 a.m.

Coffee Break

10:30 – 12:15 a.m.

Panel IV: Lessons Learned? Historical and Cultural Perspectives on                                              Climate Migration

Chair: Andreas Huebner (Kiel University)

Andy Horowitz (University of Connecticut): New Orleans’s history is America’s future

Eleonora Rohland (Bielefeld University): tba, via Zoom

William D. Buckingham (Institute for Public Ethnomusicology): The Louisiana Décima Project: Music Sustainability and Language Revitalization in a Changing Landscape

 

12:15 – 1:30 p.m.

Lunch Break

 

1:30 – 2:30 p.m.

Creative Scenarios and Solutions: Designing Adaptive Futures 

Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown University) and Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania)

 

2:30 – 4:30 p.m.

Breakout Groups: Future Research and Public Engagement Strategies

Facilitators: Jana Dunz-Keck and Sarah Beringer (German Historical Institute Washington)

 

4:30 – 5:00 p.m.

Coffee Break

 

5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

Closing Panel: Where Do We Go From Here? Research, Policy, and Publics            

Chairs: Max Gruenig (POCACITO Network/Georgetown University) and Brendan O’Donnell (POCACITO Network/Heinrich Böll Foundation)

Jacqui Patterson (The Chisholm Legacy Project), Justin Ángel Knighten (The George Washington University Alliance for a Sustainable Future)

 
Organizers
Jana Dunz-Keck

 

Jana Dunz-Keck is a research fellow in Digital History and History of the Americas at the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI), where she coordinates the institute’s Digital History research area. Her work spans North American history, migration history, and environmental history, with a particular focus on media and gender studies. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Stuttgart in 2023. Her monograph, Migration and HERitage (De Gruyter Brill), maps the German-American press’s transregional networks and highlights women’s roles in immigrant journalism. Her current project examines the political and cultural history of managed retreat—climate-induced planned relocation—in the United States since the 1980s and is part of the international initiative Global Indo-Pacific (Max Weber Foundation), which investigates colonial and postcolonial entanglements and their relevance to contemporary ecological and geopolitical challenges.

Sarah Beringer

 

Sarah Beringer has been Research Associate and Head of Strategy & Communications at the German Historical Institute in Washington since 2016. Coming from a political economy background, her current research focuses on the clean tech revolution and related industrial policy in the United States also in the context of the economic rivalry with China. From 2019 to 2022 she was a fellow in the Max Weber Stiftung Project “Interaction and Knowledge in the Pacific Region. Entanglements and Disentanglements.” Since May 2025 she coordinates Module 3 “Earth, Energy, and Water” of the Max Weber Network “Global Indo-Pacific: Connecting Histories and Futures” which is a collaboration between the German Institute for Japanese Studies Tokio, the National University of Singapore/ Asian Research Center, the Max Weber Forum Delhi and the German Historical Institutes in London, Paris, and Washington D.C. Sarah holds a PhD in Economics and Social Sciences and a Master in Business Administration from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Simon Richter

 

Simon Richter is the 1965 Endowed Term Chair of Germanic Studies. Simon’s research focuses on cultural aspects of climate adaptation in Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the United States. As an environmental humanist, Simon engages in activities that blur distinctions between traditional scholarship, urban design, and environmental activism. Simon and Poldergeist were featured in the VPRO documentary “De Klimaatverkenner” (2022). In 2023, he collaborated with Dutch comedian Patrick Nederkoorn to produce “A New Peace of Münster,” a documentary about climate migration along the Dutch-German border. He is the director of Project Poldergeist, an experiment in using animated video to inform and influence policymakers about controversial aspects of climate adaptation. With Penn fine arts prof Joshua Mosley, Simon co-directs the Penn Animation as Research Lab.

Andreas Huebner

 

Andreas Hübner is Senior Lecturer in History Education at Kiel University. His research focuses on Cultural and Global History, History Education, and Human–Animal Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in 2015 from Justus Liebig University Giessen. His publications include numerous monographs, edited volumes, and articles, among them a 2024 special issue on the Anthropocene (co-edited with Andreas Sommer, Zeitschrift für Geschichtsdidaktik). His current project examines the role of Human–Animal Studies and the Anthropocene in secondary education.

Max Gruenig

 

Max Gruenig is a climate and energy economist with expertise and experience in the US and Europe and one of the co-founders of POCACITO. He also works with the climate policy think tank E3G and Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Max Gruenig was President of the Ecologic Institute USA from 2015 to 2020 and worked for the Ecologic Institute Berlin from 2007 to 2018. Max has researched European and US energy and climate policy; urban sustainability, especially climate protection and the circular economy. He has frequently lectured on energy and climate policy at universities and other institutions and has briefed members of Congress and testified before state and national legislators.

 

Brendan O’Donnell

 

Brendan O’Donnell is the Heinrich Boell Foundation’s Climate and Environment Policy Program Director in Washington, D.C. since February 2025. He has more than a decade of experience working to bring new communities and ways of knowing to transatlantic and global environmental policy discourse. He has published on a variety of topics including low-carbon energy security, Arctic sustainable development, and ESG investing, and is one of the co-founders of POCACITO.

 

 
Participants
Hélène Benveniste

Hélène Benveniste is an Assistant Professor in Global Environmental Policy at the Department of Environmental Social Sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. She works on international environmental policy and politics, with focuses on climate-related human migration, the politics of energy transitions, and global governance of environmental issues. In her research, she uses both quantitative and qualitative methods drawn from political and other social sciences. Her work has appeared in scientific journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Climate Change. Prior to joining Stanford, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. She holds a Ph.D. in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy from Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.

 

Will Buckingham


Will Buckingham is a New Orleans-based researcher, educator, writer, and musician. His doctoral dissertation was the first book-length study focused on the Isleño décima, a unique tradition of Spanish folk song from St. Bernard Parish, and he founded the Institute for Public Ethnomusicology in order to leverage his research and experience to reach wider audiences and work to sustain this beautiful and threatened tradition. Will Buckingham is a librarian and instructor at the Moss Memorial Library at Delgado Community College and holds degrees in jazz studies and musicology from Tulane University, the MLIS and certificate in archival studies from Louisiana State University, and the PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.

 

Dagomar Degroot

Dagomar Degroot is an associate professor of environmental history at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System (Belknap Press/Viking, 2025), the co-editor of volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Resilience in the History of Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 2026), as well as numerous articles in scientific and historical journals. He produces and hosts the “Climate Chronicles” podcast.

 

Nepomuk Dunz

 

Nepomuk Dunz is a Senior Economist in the World Bank Group’s Finance, Competitiveness, and Investment Global Practice, currently based in Washington DC. His work focuses on macro-financial stability as well as climate- and nature-related financial risks and opportunities, where he is currently leading the work on climate-related financial risk assessment and stress-testing for the World Bank. He has contributed to and led technical analysis as well as policy and advisory services in multiple World Bank client countries. He holds a B.Sc. in International Economics and European Studies from University of Tübingen, and a M.Sc. in Socio-Ecological Economics as well as a Doctorate in Climate Macroeconomics and Finance, both from Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) in Austria. During his doctorate, Nepomuk also worked at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and as a PhD Trainee in the Macroprudential Policy and Financial Stability Division of the European Central Bank (ECB), contributing to the development of ECB’s climate stress test framework.

 

Wiwandari Handayani

 

Wiwandari Handayani is a Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Universitas Diponegoro. Since 2011, she has been actively involved in research and work focusing on urban resilience and climate adaptation. Wiwandari serves as an expert with extensive experience in designing, managing, and implementing multi-stakeholder and cross-sector initiatives in Indonesia, particularly in Semarang and the North Java region. Additionally, she has contributed to the Networking Unit Paradigm Shift (NUPS), which addresses issues related to migration, cities, and climate change, with support from the German government. She has also received several international research grants from organizations in relevant fields, including KONEKSI (Australia), KOICA (Republic of Korea), DAAD (Germany), and the LUCE Foundation (United States).

 

Rizqa Hidayani

 

Rizqa Hidayani is an urban planner and Program Manager for the Climate and Urban Resilience Division at the Kota Kita Foundation (Indonesia), where she advances urban resilience and social inclusion through community-centric programs. She is currently a Humphrey Fellow in the SPURS Program at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, focusing on inclusive approaches to climate-resilient cities and communities. Her research interests include climate adaptation, climate migration, community-centric design, and equitable resilience strategies in the face of environmental change.

 

Felicitas Hillmann

 

Felicitas Hillmann is a leading scholar in migration studies with over 20 years of expertise and 200 international publications in this field of knowledge. She coordinated a major research consortium on “Environmental change and migration in coastal areas in Ghana and Indonesia” (2014 – 2017), published on the role of the diaspora in times of climate change. She recently published a study on “Climate change, migration and social policies”, focussing on the German situation, especially so Ahrweiler. Over the past 4 years she was building up an international network of migration scholars, the nups-network, which concentrates on the issues of environmental change, new technologies and labor market integration. Since 2015 she is affiliated with TU Berlin.

 

Bruce Holsinger

 

Bruce Holsinger is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the editor of New Literary History. His most recent nonfiction book, On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age, examines the parchment inheritance of the Euro-Mediterranean world. He is also the author of five novels, including Culpability, the Oprah’s Book Club pick for summer 2025, and The Displacements, which imagines the world’s first Category 6 hurricane and its aftermath. His works of fiction and nonfiction have won numerous awards, and he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

 

Andy Horowitz

 

Andy Horowitz is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and serves as the Connecticut State Historian. He is the author of Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020), which won the Bancroft Prize in American history; the co-editor of Critical Disaster Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021); and the guest editor of the 2025 special issue of the journal Southern Cultures entitled “Katrina’s America.”

 

Lindsay Jenkins

 

Lindsay Jenkins is an expert in global refugee and migration matters and an Affiliated Scholar with the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. Previously, Lindsay was a Senior Advisor to the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, where she played a key role in signature elements of the Biden-Harris Administration’s approach to these issues, including driving action to address the impacts of climate change on migration and displacement. Before that, she spent over a decade with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and was an immigration attorney. She also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras. Lindsay holds a J.D and M.A. in International Affairs from American University and a B.A. in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.

 

Justin Ángel Knighten

 

Justin Ángel Knighten is a national communications strategist, crisis leader, and public affairs executive working at the intersection of government, business, media, and community trust. From 2021 to 2025, he served as Associate Administrator for External Affairs at FEMA, leading national communications during some of the most complex disasters in recent history, including major hurricanes, wildfires, and long-term recovery operations. He worked closely with governors, mayors, federal leaders, and frontline responders, translating high-stakes decisions into clear, trusted public guidance when it mattered most.

Justin is the founder of Ángel Public Affairs and a principal at Pinnacle Collective Public Affairs and Mozaic Media + Communications, advising clients on crisis response, reputation management, and storytelling. His cross-sector work spans major corporate brands, nonprofits, governments, and advocacy organizations across California and nationally.

He is a current Fellow with the George Washington University Alliance for a Sustainable Future, a National Leadership Council member at the University of Washington Foster School of Business Climate Risk Lab, and a former Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

 

Carolien Kraan

 

Carolien Kraan is an interdisciplinary researcher with expertise in climate adaptation and policy. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Miami, where she studied policies on “making room for water” in a changing climate. Her research focused on the social justice of voluntary buyout programs in the US and the perspectives on adaptive planning in the Netherlands. Carolien is driven to connect science and policy. She has contributed to policy processes on adaptation in the Netherlands, at the American government agencies FEMA and USACE, and also the IPCC. In addition to the Netherlands, she has enjoyed living in Hong Kong, Scotland, California and Florida. With experience in both academic and applied research, she brings a broad, international perspective to climate adaptation issues.

 

Patrick Nederkoorn

 

Patrick Nederkoorn is a Dutch comedian, cabaret artist, and writer who bridges the worlds of humor and social reflection. He performs in both the Netherlands and Germany, where his sharp wit, personal storytelling, and socially engaged themes have earned him critical acclaim. Patrick studied political science and theology before attending the Koningstheateracademie in ’s-Hertogenbosch, a renowned Dutch theatre school. This diverse background shapes his unique perspective: his shows combine political insight, moral curiosity, and a keen sense of the absurdities of modern life. In his cabaret performances, Patrick intertwines personal stories with pressing social themes such as climate change, migration, and identity. His Dutch show Hoogtij (High Tide) and its German counterpart Die Orangene Gefahr – Die Holländer kommen! imagine a future in which rising sea levels force all Dutch citizens to flee to Germany. With humor and empathy, Patrick Neederkoorn explores what happens when a nation literally loses its ground.

 

Laura Otto

 

Laura Otto is Junior Professor of “Anthropology of the Rural” at the Chair of European Ethnology, Julius–Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (since October 2023). Her work bridges environmental and climate anthropology, multispecies ethnography, and forced migration studies, with a sustained interest in the cultural politics of coastal and island regions. Earlier, she served as Principal Investigator on the DFG-funded project “Making Algae (In)Visible” (Goethe University Frankfurt, 2021–2023), conducting ethnographic research on Sargassum algae in the Caribbean. Her doctoral research—completed at the University of Bremen (2015–2020)—investigated how “adult minors” are categorized and negotiated within the EU border regime in Malta.

 

Jacqueline Patterson

 

Jacqueline Patterson is the Founder and Executive Director of The Chisholm Legacy Project (TCLP). TCLP’s mission is to serve as a vehicle to connect Black frontline communities with the resources to actualize visions.

Prior to the launch of TCLP, Patterson served as the Senior Director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program for over a decade. During her tenure, she led a team in designing and implementing a robust portfolio including serving the state and local leadership whose constituencies consisted of hundreds of communities on the frontlines of environmental injustice through political education and organizing work executed by NAACP branches, chapters, and state conferences.

Patterson has dedicated her career to intersectional approaches to systems change. Working with frontline communities from Kampala to Kalamazoo to Kingston, her passion for social justice led her to serve as coordinator & co-founder of Women of Color United; Senior Women’s Rights Policy Analyst for ActionAid; Assistant Vice-President of HIV/AIDS Programs for IMA World Health, Outreach Project Associate for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Research Coordinator for Johns Hopkins University, and U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer in Jamaica.

Patterson holds a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University. She currently serves on the Advisory Boards for Center for Earth Ethics, Environmental Justice Movement Fellowship, and the Hive Fund for Gender and Climate Justice, on the Governance Assemblies for Mosaic Momentum, and Collectrify, as well as on the Boards of Directors for the Bill Anderson Fund, Emerald Cities Collaborative, Movement Strategy Center, the Just Solutions Collective, the National Black Workers Center Project, and Ceres.

 

Eleonora Rohland

 

Eleonora Rohland has been professor for entangled history of the Americas at Bielefeld University since 2015. She was trained as an economic, social, and environmental historian at the University of Bern, Switzerland and received her PhD from Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Since its inception in 2017, she has been a principal investigator in the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS), Bielefeld University/University of Guadalajara, Mexico and in that context a co-coordinator of the research laboratory “The Anthropocene as Multiple Crisis: Perspectives from Latin America”. Eleonora Rohland currently co-directs the interdisciplinary project “Deciphering OLD ship Records to Understand the Maritime Structure of the Atlantic Intertropical Convergence Zone“ (DOLDRUMS) with two colleagues from the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. Her research focus brings together environmental history, and specifically climate impact- and disaster history with the perspective of entangled history(ies). In this context she is also interested in the Anthropocene and its important (and unequal) pre-history in the Americas. Currently, Eleonora Rohland is a member of the University Council and the director of Bielefeld’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) (shared leadership).

 

Kira Vinke

 

Kira Vinke is head of the Center for Climate and Foreign Policy at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). She is also a member of the Advisory Board to the Federal Government for Civilian Crisis Prevention and Peacebuilding, which she co-chaired from 2018 to January 2025. From 2014-2022, she worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Before joining DGAP, she headed the East Africa Peru India Climate Capacities (EPICC) project there. Kira Vinke has been a member of the advisory board of Germany’s Federal Academy for Security Policy (BAKS) since 2022. She is also a member of the board of trustees of the German Climate Foundation (Deutsche KlimaStiftung) and of the World Vision Deutschland e.V. In addition, Vinke is a member of the German section of “Aktion gegen den Hunger” (Action Against Hunger), and the Development Service and Humanitarian Aid Committee of “Brot für die Welt” (bread for the world).

 

Koko Warner

 

Koko Warner is Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s International Climate Observatory and former Director of IOM’s Global Data Institute, where she united global expertise in migration data collection, governance, analysis, and forecasting to inform high-stakes policy and action. Koko’s career spans leadership roles across the United Nations and top research institutions. At the UNFCCC, she led global policy on climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and risk. At the United Nations University, she directed pioneering research on climate migration and loss and damage, co-founding the Munich Climate Insurance Initiative (MCII) to advance climate risk management. She has held posts at ETH Zürich and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). Her field-defining research on climate migration and loss and damage shaped the Paris Agreement and continues to influence climate finance and resilience worldwide. Koko holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Vienna, magna cum laude as a Fulbright fellow.

 

Claudia Wolff

 

Claudia Wolff leads the Volkswagen Foundation–funded junior research group RECOAST-VISION (Reimagining Coastal Flood Adaptation for Tomorrow’s Baltic Sea Coast: Visionary Strategies for Transformative Coastal Adaptation) at Kiel University’s Geography Department. Over the next five years, her team will develop visionary, community-driven strategies for coastal flood adaptation along the Baltic Sea in collaboration with the Danish Coastal Authority and local stakeholders. Claudia studied Geography and Environmental Management and earned her PhD on addressing data limitations and uncertainties in broad-scale coastal flood risk assessments. Her research focuses on coastal flood risk assessment, adaptation planning, and transformative measures.