Chair in Human Geography with a Focus on Human Environment Relations
Research and Teaching Unit Human Environment Relations
Dean, Faculty of Geosciences
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To fix an appointment, please contact the secretariat at: office-HER@geographie.uni-muenchen.de
Prof. Dr. Matthias Garschagen holds the chair in human geography and heads the Teaching and Research Unit for Human Environment Relations at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). He further is a Honorary Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies.
Prof. Garschagen’s research focuses on risk, vulnerability, adaptation and transformation in the context of environmental hazards and climate change, particularly in cities. He is most interested in the ways urbanization and other societal changes shape future trends in risk, exposure and vulnerability in relation to environmental and climate hazards. A second focus is on the evaluation of different adaptation options, including those to floods, heat waves and cyclones, and the governance of risk reduction, particularly at the interface of state and non-state actors. In his research, Prof. Garschagen combines a global view with regional and local expertise in Southeast Asia (especially Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore), South Asia (especially India), West Africa (especially Ghana and Nigeria) and Europe (especially Germany).
Next to a number of book projects, Prof. Garschagen's research findings have been published in well over 70 papers in high-ranking international journals (e.g. Nature, Nature Climate Change, Scientific Reports, Global Environmental Change, Environmental Research Letters, Planning Theory and Practice, Urban Climate, npj Urban Sustainability, Climate and Development). Articles include, for example, those on equitable climate change adaptation (in Nature), the need to strengthen resilience in small and mid-sized cities (in Nature), the governance of roles and responsibilities in climate change adaptation (in Nature Climate Change), transitions in risk management from resilience to transformation (in Ecology and Society), the relationship between global urbanization trends and climate change vulnerability (in Climatic Change), the evaluation of different risk indices (in Climatic Change), the advancement of urban growth modeling for climate change exposure analysis (in Environmental Research Letters), the effectiveness of decentralizing risk reduction in Vietnam (in Habitat International) or on the applicability of urban resilience concepts across different cultural contexts (in Natural Hazards).
A full record of publications can be accessed here.
Prof. Garschagen has been serving as a Lead Author in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Special Report on Ocean and the Cryosphere (SROCC), the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) and the Synthesis Report of the Sixth Assessment Cycle (SYR). For a number of years, he has been the scientific lead of the World Risk Report and he co-leads the expert working group on natural hazards and environmental risks within the German Association of Geographers. Prof. Garschagen has served as an associate editor of the international journals Climate and Development and Urban Climate as well as an editorial board member of the Journal of Extreme Events. He has been Principal Investigator or overall coordinator of well over a dozen international research projects.
Prof. Garschagen takes joy in covering a range of topics in human geography across BSc, MSc and education (Lehramt) programmes, both in German as well as English language. His portfolio comprises lectures in urban geography, climate related risk and adaptation, spatial planning, disaster risk reduction, resource geographies and regional geography. In seminars he covers thematic, theoretical and methodological classes (e.g. on spatial assessment tools, indicator-based assessments, empirical social science methods, statistics, scenario techniques or regional development).
Before joining LMU in 2019, Matthias Garschagen worked for the United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) in Bonn, where he lead a section of around 20 researchers working on Vulnerability Assessment, Risk Management and Adaptive Planning (VARMAP) from 2014 to 2019. Matthias Garschagen holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Cologne, Germany (2013). He has extended fieldwork experience in Vietnam (over 18 months) and a number of other countries, including India and Indonesia. Matthias Garschagen studied Geography, Economics and Cultural Anthropology in Cologne and Vancouver at Simon Fraser University (2002 to 2008). He received scholarships from the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Matthias Garschagen's work has been met with considerable interest in the media, resulting in frequent interviews in TV (e.g. tagesthemen, heute journal, tagesschau), radio (e.g. BR IQ Wissenschaft und Forschung) and newspapers (e.g. Süddeutsche, ZEIT, FAZ, Spielgel, the guardian). More information can be accessed here.