On 22 January 2024, Nicole van Maanen successfully defended her PhD thesis “Development of scenarios for sectoral adaptive capacity to climate change”, supervised by Prof. Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, at the Geography Department at HU Berlin. She graduated with magna cum laude.

In her doctoral thesis, Nicole developed indices to evaluate adaptive capacity, delving into their socioeconomic drivers to project future trends into the 21st century. Nations with lower development, notably in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, hold significant potential for advancement, although progress will unfold gradually over decades. The integration of adaptive capacity into quantitative climate assessments stands as a crucial step toward understanding climate change risks and pathways to climate resilience.

Nicole will soon start working as a postdoc researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam working on multi-(hazard-)risk assessment and management

We congratulate Nicole on completing her doctoral thesis and wish her all the best for her future!