Maarten van Aalst

Netherlands

Maarten van Aalst is a professor in climate and disaster resilience at University of Twente, and was formerly director of the international Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. He has over 20 years of experience bridging climate science, policy and practice, from local to global and across timescales, shaping humanitarian operations, development investments and international policy. 

Maarten is coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Climate Risk Management.

He also serves on the Technical Expert Group on Comprehensive Risk Management of the UNFCCC Warsaw International Mechanism on Loss and Damage, the Science for Global Development Steering Committee at the Dutch Research Council, and advisory boards of several international research programmes on climate risk management.

After completing a PhD in atmospheric science at Utrecht University and the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, he has worked on climate and disaster risk management with the World Bank, regional development banks, the OECD and several governments.