Trained as an Earth Scientist, Jeroen Aerts has been the international forefront of modelling flood risks and othe natural hazards for more than 30 years. At the basis of his work are quantitative risk assessment methods combining hydrological models and risk models. Over the last 10 years, Jeroen Aerts has become a pioneer in the area of modelling complex human-water interactions. In his work, he explains that how people respond to floods depends on both hydrological and socio-economic conditions. In various papers, he showed the importance of addressing housholds in flood risk assessment and that flood risk at large scales can be reduced by over 25%. due to household adaptation. For this, he coupled a global-scale agent-based model to a fully dynamic hydrological model in an ERC Advanced project, simulating for the first time flood management decisions of 200 million individuals. In a paper in Nature Water, he shows there are, however, limits to the human capacity to adapt to future flood risk.
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 240 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 32 key publications in Nature, Science and PNAS (H index ggl: 97). From 2019 onwards, 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, risk modelling, agent-based modelling, scenario analysis, adaptation pathways, and optimization.
Jeroen is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Art and Sciences (KNAW) and won the AGU Gilbert White Award for his work in natural hazard assessment. He was awarded by the prestigious ERC Advanced grant in 2021 (2.5 mln Euros), The German Humboldt Award for his Scientific track record, 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 Dutch Data price in 2020, and 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 hydrological modeller at the UvA (University of Amsterdam) and as GIS specialist at Resource Analysis ltd. After conducting a PhD research at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Jeroen started working in 2002 at VU University Amsterdam. Since then, Jeroen has developed an internationally recognized flood risk research group, in close collaboration with MIT, Princeton, UCSB, Wharton, IIASA, Columbia University, and London School of Economics. Jeroen also signed an agreement with GfZ, 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 was 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 was 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, Hydrology, Risk assess,emt, Insurance, Decision making, Adaptation, Climate change.
