Prof. Dr. Liang Emlyn Yang

Further Information

Prof. Dr. Liang Emlyn Yang (杨也明) is Professor of Geography and Flood Resilience at the Department of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). He is also an Adjunct Professor at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, and an Affiliated Research Associate (Visiting Scholar) at Harvard University, USA.

Research

Prof. Yang’s research explores the resilience of human-social systems to climate change impacts. He is particularly interested in how societies build and sustain resilience against environmental and climate threats. Another interest is in the assessment and modeling of resilience achievement, progress and potentials. His work emphasizes successful cases, demonstrates significant progress, and showcases the wide array of solutions, technologies, and strategies that enables resilient development. He frames climate resilience through a hopeful lens that underscores human potential, adaptability, and innovation, and fosters a narrative of optimism of human-climate relations against the backdrop of risk and crisis discourses. Besides the specific and technical work, Prof. Yang attempts to understand the fundamental, conceptual and theoretical issues of “resilience systems”.

Prof. Yang employs a diverse set of methodologies, including household surveys, expert interviews, stakeholder network analysis, agent-based modeling, geo-information system and data-driven machine learning. His research spans multiple global regions, including China, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Nepal, and Germany, with a historical perspective on social resilience over the past 5,000 years.

Publications

Prof. Yang has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications covering climate change modeling, risk, vulnerability, adaptation, resilience, urbanization, floods, sustainability, and historical geography. He was the lead editor of Socio-Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road (Springer, 2019) and contributed to seven chapters of the German textbook China - Geographien einer Weltmacht (Springer, 2023). Prof. Yang has been leading the editing or co-editing five Special Issues in journals such as Global Environmental Change, Environmental Science and Policy, Environmental Research Letters, Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, Journal of Flood Risk Management.

A full list of his publications is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

Other roles and responsibilities

Prof. Yang has been (Co-) Principal Investigator of eight international research projects, and convener or co-convener of over 10 international conferences, meetings and workshops. Prof. Yang has served as editorial members of five international journals and as an expert reviewer of the IPCC AR6 WGII and peer-reviewer of over 30 scientific journals. Since over 10 years, he has been active members in the European Geosciences Union (EGU), Association of American Geographers (AAG), China Society of Natural Resources, and the German Society for Geography (DGFG).

• Principle Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant – STORIES (www.erc-stories.com) that focuses on the spatial-temporal dynamics of flood resilience. The project explores how human societies develop, maintain and enhance its resilience to floods in the Mekong basin with a historical perspective.

• Work Package Leader of the COAST-SCAPES project that is funded by the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change (Horizon Europe). The project aims to re-shape European coastal landscapes with climate-resilient interventions. It involves 31 international research partners with an overall budget of 8.92 million Euro.

• Co-Principle Investigator (with Matthias Garschagen) of the FReCom project funded by the Sino-German Mobility Programme (NSFC-DFG). The project compares flood risk management and resilience building at community level in rapidly growing cities in China and Germany.

• Convener and Organizer (jointly with Matthias Garschagen and Haifeng Jia) of the International Climate Resilience Conference in Munich during October 26-29, 2025. www.climateresilience.info.

• Founder and Manager of the active international researchers’ community of climate resilience with over 2480 members in Google Group.

• Young Member of the LMU-Munich Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) since 2023.

Teaching & Supervision

Emlyn Yang is involved in teaching activities in human geography at MSc level at LMU Munich. From the winter semester in 2020, he led the course of Applied Simulation Modelling. He contributed to the joint teaching of the lecture and practice courses on Trend Assessment, Scenario and Modelling from 2021. Over the past years, he has assisted various teaching tasks in the University of Hamburg and Kiel University.

Dr. Yang is supervising 6 doctoral students since 2022 and has co-supervised 4 master students.

Biography

Before joining LMU in 2019, Prof. Yang worked as a postdoc researcher for the Graduate School “Human Development in Landscapes” and the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University, funded by the German Excellence Initiative. He obtained his PhD (2014) in Integrative Geography from the University of Hamburg in Germany under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Jürgen Scheffran. Before that, he studied land use and regional planning in the Southwest University in Chongqing, China, and finished a master program in Geography from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He has extended fieldwork experience in China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand and short stays in the UK and US.

Beyond academia, Prof. Yang has served as an external researcher at the MIT Climate CoLab and Project Drawdown, a fellow and mentor at the EU Climate-KIC, and a consultant for the World Future Council on regenerative urban development in China.

Updated on 02 February 2026.