Jochen Hinkel's Homepage

Research Interests

As a member of PIK's Research Domain IV, Transdisciplinary Concepts and Methods and the European Climate Forum I am working in the fields of climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation (CCIVA) in particular, and sustainability science in general.

I believe that two steps are key for advancing these research fields:

First, I believe that it is necessary to directly address the transdisciplinary integration of knowledge. Even though knowledge integration is fundamental in sustainability science, the actual process of integrating knowledge is rarely addressed explicitly let alone methodically. In my doctoral thesis I attempted to do so and proposed a couple of devices that facilitate transdisciplinary knowledge integration.

Second, I believe that we need to be more explicit and specific on the problems we are addressing under the unspecific terms impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. In my opinion, the conceptual and methodical confusion prevailing in these research fields results from the fact that different scholars, while using the same terminology, address very different types of problems. In one case, for example, adaptation might mean to optimise an existing management regime, in another case to raise awareness that global environmental change is producing new threats and yet in another case it might mean to find a normative agreement between conflicting parties. A more specific terminology is needed that goes beyond the abstract terms such as vulnerability, adaptive capacity and resilience and does justice to the wide variety of problems addressed.

In the MEDIATION Project we are currently addressing this second challenge. MEDIATION aims at empirically identifying the diverse types of problems found in the context of CCIVA and at developing an integrated methodology that maps available methods to the types of problems to which they are applicable.

Publications

Curriculum Vitae

Current Projects

• In the project MEDIATION, I lead the development of an integrated methodology for assessing CCIVA.
• I maintain and co-develop the DIVA Model. DIVA (Dynamic and Interactive Vulnerability Assessment) is a global, integrated model of coastal systems developed collaboratively for assesses biophysical and socio-economic consequences of sea-level rise and socio-economic development taking into account coastal erosion (both direct and indirect), coastal flooding (including rivers), wetland change and salinity intrusion into deltas and estuaries as well as adaptation in terms of raising dikes and nourishing beaches.
• The project CLIMATECOST (Full Costs of Climate Change), funded under the European Community's 7th Framework Programme, is a study of the economics of climate change to inform policy on long-term targets, the economic costs of inaction, and the costs and benefits of adaptation. The project is quantifying the costs of climate change impacts, as compared with the costs and benefits of adaptation.

Previous Projects

• I co-lead the project FAVAIA (Formal Approaches to Vulnerability that Inform Adaptation), a joint research project between PIK and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) which aimed at alleviating some of the conceptual difficulties present in the field of CCIVA by formalising vulnerability and related concepts.
• Within the EU-funded project ADAM I co-lead the ADAM Workpackage A1 that developed a formal framework of CCIVA concepts, conducted a meta-analysis of European CCIVA studies, explored how barriers to adaptation could be overcome through social learning, and developed a Digital Adaptation Compendium that makes our research findings available on the Internet.
• In the project NEWATER I was involved in comparing and improving indicator and model-based methods for assessing water vulnerability.
• In the EU-funded project DINAS-COAST I lead the integration of sub-models to produce the DIVA Model that assess coastal impacts and adaptation.

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