Past Editions
The Amsterdam Complexity School on Climate Change (ACSCC) took place for the first time in 2024. Below you find some photos, the program, and the list of speakers the first edition.
Group Photo ACSCC 2024
Program ACSCC 2024
Projects ACSCC 2024:
Projects included mapping the pillars of support for the fossil fuel industry in order to develop effective ways to ‘defeat the fossil Goliath’, analyzing what the media emphasizes (e.g. technological solutions or climate justice) when reporting on the IPCC reports, trying to better understand the impact of celebrities such as Taylor Swift taking climate action, ‘hacking’ the food system to become more sustainable, building a web app that allows citizens to understand the carbon footprint of various activities in the city they live in, and conceptualizing the good life and how to achieve it.
Speakers ACSCC 2024
Detlef van Vuuren leads the IMAGE integrated assessment model team at PBL and is Professor of Integrated Assessment of Global Environmental Problems at Utrecht University. Detlef had a coordinating role in the development of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), scenarios heavily relied on in the IPCC reports. He serves on the board of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC), the EAT Lancet Commission, the Earth Commission, and the Global Carbon Project. Detlef has published over 460 articles in leading scientific journals and was recently named by Reuters as the world's fourth most influential climate scientist.
Marten Scheffer is Professor of Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management at Wageningen University. Marten has made fundamental contributions to the study of the stability and resilience of complex systems and pioneered the study of early warning signals to anticipate critical transitions in both natural and social systems. He is one of the most highly cited ecologists, the author of the seminal book Critical Transitions in Nature and Society, and recipient of the "Dutch Nobel Prize" (the Spinoza Prize). He co-founded the South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies and is also an acclaimed musician.
Irene Monasterolo is Professor of Climate Finance at the Utrecht University School of Economics, where she works on the role of finance in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Irene has developed methodological approaches to analyse the macro-financial criticality of climate risks and the role of green finance policies in the low-carbon transition. Her research on a climate stress tests and stock-flow consistent macro-economic models with heterogeneous, interacting agents has been published in journals such as Science and Nature Climate Change and applied by international financial institutions such as the World Bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the European Banking Authority, and national central banks. She is also an editor of the journal Ecological Economics.
Aarti Gupta is an Professor of Global Environmental Governance at Wageningen University. She works on global environmental and climate governance, with a focus on transparency and accountability and the challenges of anticipatory governance of novel technologies (such as solar geo-engineering). She is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Earth System Governance (ESG) research alliance and co-leads the international REIMAGINE consortium project on anticipatory climate governance in vulnerable regions of the global South. Aarti holds a PhD from Yale and has done postdoctoral research at Columbia and Harvard University in political science, international relations, and science and technology studies. She also worked outside of academia at the United Nations Development Programme in New York, Oxfam-Novib in the Hague, and Transparency International in Berlin.
Paul Behrens is an Associate Professor in Environmental Change at Leiden University. His research on energy, food, land use, and climate change has appeared in scientific journals and media outlets such as The New York Times, Scientific American, BBC, Nature Sustainability, Nature Energy, Nature Food, and PNAS. A physicist by training, Paul is the author of the popular science book The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science and has worked in industry, NGOs, and academia. He has provided expert scientific advice to the New Zealand Government and the British Government.
Oscar Berglund is a senior lecturer in international public and social policy at the University of Bristol. His research looks at political contestation of global processes like neoliberalisation, austerity and climate change. This includes both non-violent contestation by social movements and parliamentary forms of contestation. His research draws on a historical materialist theoretical framework with a focus on political agency and contestation. He is particularly interested in how social movements use civil disobedience to achieve their aims and how they justify their law-breaking.
Marthe Wens is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research concerns water security and societal impacts, with a specific focus on modelling the intertwined nature of drought risk and human adaptive behaviour. Marthe uses machine learning to create risk profiles to support disaster risk reduction efforts, and agent-based models to evaluate the feedbacks between drought events, food security, and adaptation. She is part of several United Nations programs and very active with Scientist Rebellion.
Anne Kervers researches the link between money creation and climate finance as a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to her PhD she worked at Triodos Bank. She is a board member of the Green Art Lab Alliance and on the advising committee of Kapitaloceen. Anne has been active in Extinction Rebellion in different roles since 2019.
Ernst-Jan Kuiper obtained a Master's degree in Climate Physics in 2014, after which he continued with a PhD about the dynamics of the Greenland ice Sheet, both at Utrecht University. He currently works at Milieudefensie on the appeal against oil giant Shell and other future lawsuits against major polluters.
Erika van der Linden holds a Master's degree in Systems Engineering and is doing her PhD at Radboud University on how firms are (and are not) contributing to the sustainable development goals. She also works as a policymaker at the Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate, where she focuses on the strategy for the Dutch energy transition, called the Dutch National Energy Plan ('nationaal plan energiesysteem').
Esmé Fantozzi is the founder of AklysTransform, a consultancy with the mission of enabling and accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, especially in hard-to-decarbonize sectors. Esmé worked internationally, and for almost 20 years, in the oil and gas sector. She held central corporate roles, and frontline ones in operated ventures and as a secondee in non-operated ventures, working and living in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Asia. She holds a Laurea in Physics from Padua University and a Master of Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kornelia Dimitrova is an architect, researcher, and writer based in Rotterdam and Eindhoven. Over the years, she has taught, written, spoken, designed, advised, and advocated for the value of caring and ecological imaginations in enabling spatial and social transformations. In 2021, she authored the Playbook for Healing environments, a spatial strategy for one of the largest and oldest mental health estates in The Netherlands. In 2018, she co-founded Foundation We Are and currently leads the Collaborations for Future program, focused on making the collaborations between designers and climate scientists more effective and sustainable.
Rachel Donald is the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis with 11,000+ subscribers from 163 countries. Planet: Critical connects the dots of science, art, language, politics, media, philosophy and power to reveal the big picture. Rachel speaks internationally on this ecosystem as an independent researcher and writer. Alongside Planet: Critical, her world exclusive investigations into climate corruption have been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Mongabay, The Intercept, Byline Times and the New Republic.
