From 2015 to 2020, Jeroen Aerts was director of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) , the oldest multidisciplinary environmental research institute in the Netherlands. IVM has a total of 120 Staff and PhD’s divided over 4 departments. Within IVM, Jeroen is now head of the department ‘Water and Climate Risk’. Jeroen has an established an internationally recognized leading position in the field of water and climate risk management with 25 key publications in Nature, Science and PNAS (H index ggl: 75). In 2019 and 2020, he was awarded as the top 1% highly cited researcher globally, by Web of Science.
In 2007 he was appointed to the chair in Risk and Insurance, and in 2012 to a second chair in Risk and Water management. Jeroen currently supervises a research group, with 14 academic staff, 42 PhD students and 8 post-docs addressing various aspects of water and climate risk management. He has developed and applied a wide range of assessment and modelling methods to analyze water risk (flood/drought) and climate adaptation at scales from local to global. The methods include: hydrological modelling, insurance, catastrophe modelling, agent-based modelling, scenario analysis, pathways, and optimization. On the basis of scientific results in the area of climate and flood risk modelling, Jeroen was awarded by the prestigious ERC Advanced grant in 2020 (2.5 mln Euros) and a NWO-VICI grant (1.5 mln Euros) in 2014. Jeroen also won the best paper award of the Journal of Risk Analysis in 2012 and 2013. He also won the Lloyds science of Risk prize in 2014, for his paper on flood risk in New York City, published in Science. He Received the Humboldt award in 2021
Jeroen started his career as a spatial GIS modeller and hydrological modelling specialist at Resource Analysis ltd. After conducting a PhD research at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Jeroen started working in 2002 at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Since then, Jeroen has developed an internationally recognized flood risk research group, in close collaboration with MIT, Princeton, Wharton, IIASA, Columbia University, and London School of Economics. Jeroen also signed an agreement with Potsdam University (Germany) and Vienna University (Austria) for an advanced PhD exchange programme in the area of hydrology and Water Sciences. In early 2002, Jeroen co-initiated the first large scale climate adaptation research programme in the Netherlands (‘Klimaat voor Ruimte’, 110 Million Euros of FES funding) and was responsible for the setup and coordination of all climate adaptation research projects (24 mln Euros). In 2010, Jeroen co-initiated a second FES-funded programme: ‘Knowlegde for Climate’, and was responsible for the coordination of all river and climate adaptation projects. Jeroen is scientific coordinator of the Connecting Delta Cities initiative under the Clinton C-40 global cities network, and Co-authored the OECD report on Water Security. His international work also includes research with Munich RE, Red Cross and UNISDR. Jeroen was advisor to Mayor Bloomberg of New York City on flood risk resilience issues, before and in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Finally, he is coordinator of the EU ENHANCE project on risk and Natural Hazards and programme director of the MSc Hydrology educational programme at VU Amsterdam.
Expertise
Floods, Droughts, Risk management, Insurance, Decision support, Adaptation, Climate change.
