Senior researcher
Physical Geography and Earth System Interactions
Land-use change, Global carbon cycle, Co-organizer of department colloquium
Office address:
Luisenstraße 37
Room A 203
80333 Munich
Office hours:
Please schedule an appointment via email.
I am a physicist and climate scientist, with a primary research focus on quantifying the impact of anthropogenic land use on the global carbon cycle. My secondary focus lies in studying human heat stress, both globally and in urban environments.
Global Carbon Cycle
The newest assessment of the global carbon cycle, for which I preprocessed the data for calculating CO2 emissions from land-use change, can be found in the Global Carbon Budget 2024.
In December 2022, we published an article that shows how estimates of emissions from land use, land-use change, and forestry from different datasets can be reconciled at the country-level (Schwingshackl et al., 2022). We show that the reconciliation is generally successful for various countries, and we identify potential reasons for remaining differences. I also contributed to a related study focusing on global estimates (Grassi et al., 2023).
Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF)
This blog post on Carbon Brief summarizes and discusses CO2 emissions from land-use change in six countries/regions with large emissions. It gives a comprehensible overview on the drivers of CO2 emissions from land-use change.
A review about the current state, recent progress, and emerging topics of land-use effects on climate, to which I contributed, is published here.
Heat stress
Urban areas are hotspots of heat stress due to the high population density in cities and the urban heat island effect. To analyze the future development of heat stress in European cities under climate change we used high-resolution simulations from regional climate models (EURO-CORDEX) and calculated different day-time and night-time heat indicators (Schwingshackl et al., 2024).
A group of students that I supervised in the project seminar "Heat stress in cities" developed a method that can be used to monitor the effectiveness of measures to mitigate urban heat islands based on Landsat satellite data. They published the results using the city of Stuttgart as a case study (Seeberg et al., 2022).
Using several heat stress indicators, we performed an assessment of future trends and exceedances of impact-relevant thresholds based on CMIP6 models (Schwingshackl et al., 2021).
My publication list can be found on Google Scholar
06/2025 - 06/2025
Great excursion: Norway
10/2024 - 02/2025
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
05/2024 - 05/2024
Great excursion: Hamburg & Norway
10/2023 - 02/2024
Project seminar: Comparison of greenhouse gas emissions in several countries
10/2023 - 02/2024
Seminar: Climate change and climate impacts
07/2023 - 07/2023
Class excursion: Meteorological observatory at Hohenpeißenberg & Peißenberg mining museum
04/2023 - 07/2023
Exercise: Analysis of spatial and temporal data
10/2022 - 02/2023
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
10/2022 - 02/2023
Seminar: Climate change and climate impacts
04/2022 - 07/2022
Exercise: Analysis of spatial and temporal data
10/2021 - 02/2022
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
04/2021 - 07/2021
Exercise: Analysis of spatial and temporal data
02/2021 - 03/2021
Project seminar: Heat stress in cities
Co-organizer of department colloquium Earth Futures