Dr. Maarten van Aalst

Dr Maarten van Aalst is Director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, the global reference centre on climate risk management for the international Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, working with a network of 190 national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies with 18 million local volunteers, as well as a wide range of partners including governments, development banks, UN agencies, private sector, civil society and academic institutions.

He is Coordinating Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and serves on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR) and the Leadership Group of the UN Climate Resilience Initiative (A2R).

Maarten holds adjoint positions at Columbia University in New York City (International Research Institute for Climate and Society), at University College London (Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy), and at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London, where he leads the knowledge manager for the BRACED resilience program. He also serves on the leadership team of the Partners for Resilience alliance, and in advisory boards of several major international research programs on climate risk management, including CARIAA, IMPREX and FATHUM.

Maarten previously worked on climate risk management with the World Bank and several other development banks, international organisations, and government departments around the world.

He obtained his PhD in Atmospheric Science from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

Dr. Maarten van Aalst @ Red Cross / Red Crescent Climate Centre