Guest researcher Dr Sasha Kosanic visiting LMU

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By Jan Petzold

We had the great pleasure of hosting Dr. Sasha Kosanic from Liverpool John Moores University at LMU within the TRANSCEND project. Sasha is an integrative geographer, combining physical and human geography perspectives, for example, in her research on climate change, biodiversity loss, and wellbeing impacts on vulnerable populations.

During her stay at the Department of Geography, Sasha gave a presentation on “Environmental Change - Pathways to Sustainable and Just Futures” together with TRANSCEND postdoc Jan Petzold. In their presentation, they highlight the importance of understanding the specific concerns of people with disabilities in the context of climate change. This highly vulnerable and marginalised group is underrepresented in decision-making adaptation planning, and there is also little academic literature on impacts and adaptation to climate and environmental change involving people with disabilities. Therefore, Sasha and Jan suggest using the “leverage points perspective” to identify pathways for inclusive transformational adaptation.

We used the week with Sasha for discussions with other members of our project and working group and to develop a strategy for including a specific focus on people with disabilities within TRANSCEND. Moreover, we drafted the first ideas on how to operationalise the leverage points perspective for our current and future research on transformational and just adaptation to climate change.

You will certainly read more about this soon, as we also aim to give joint conference talks and publish research papers together – and Sasha is planning to come back to Munich in the summer to continue our collaboration.