Awareness of climate change and different perspectives in the Amazon region

Climate change is part of the routine in many regions across the globe, even if not directly perceived by the inhabitants of those areas. Over the last years, the Amazon rainforest has been the focus of environmental discussions due to the tipping point approach. Apart from all of the global discussions and immediate consequences for the local and regional weather and environmental conditions, climate change is still an abstract concept for the local population, that is completely apart of the importance of their environment. The locals are used to the abundance of water and forest, just recently dealing with scarcity of drinking water and safe food throughout the year. In general, they do not realize that they live in the major tropical rainforest of the planet, and do not link the changes on land use to rainfall effects, reduced cropping area, safe water intake, navigability and transportation, for example. The project aims to deepen the discussion to translate nature-based solutions into viable tools/actions with ideas and techniques to collect social and behavioural data in the local communities. The data could reveal the local view of nature and climate change, and show the level of awareness, mitigation and/or adaptation measures to stimulate the discussion and conservation of different forest environments.

Willem Odendaal obtained his PhD in Law from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland in January 2023. He is an admitted legal practitioner in the High and Supreme Courts of Namibia. He was the project coordinator of the Land, Environment and Development project at the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC), Namibia’s only public interest law firm from 2006 until December 2019. Willem has conducted extensive socio-legal research on topics such as the Namibian Land Reform Programme, mining, climate change, the Community Based Natural Resources Management Programme (CBNRM) and Indigenous Peoples’ land and environmental rights. Willem has also done comparative research on post resettlement support in Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. He also has research experience in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon and Ghana. He is currently setting up a new public interest law firm in Namibia, to continue supporting the human, land and environmental rights of the people of Namibia.

Ross Mittiga received his PhD from the University of Virginia in 2018 and has since worked as an assistant professor at the Instituto de Ciencia Política of the Universidad Católica de Chile. He focuses primarily on issues related to the political and ethical implications of the climate crisis. Ross' work has appeared in a number of journals, including the American Political Science Review, Philosophical Studies, and the Review of Politics. This October, he completed a revision of a book under contract with Oxford University Press, "Before Collapse: Climate Change as Political Catastrophe." Ross is also co-editor of Revista de Ciencia Politica, a leading political science journal in Latin America.

Ross will use the fellowship at the University of Graz to advance a new project on "radical" forms of climate action. While this represents a new area of research for him, to do so he can build on a core argument of much of his recent work: climate change threatens the material conditions of justice, political stability, and legitimacy. From this normative starting point, he works to delineate the potential moral limits and justifications of more extreme forms of climate action , such as international sanctions, targeted attacks on infrastructure, eco-sabotage and terrorism, and "uncivil" disobedience to climate change.

Timothy Foreman is a Research Associate at the Qatar Centre for Global Banking & Finance at King's Business School, King's College London and an Associate Researcher at the RFF-CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment (EIEE). Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at EIEE in Milan and an associate professor at IE University in Madrid.  In 2019, he received his PhD in sustainable development from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.  His research focuses on environmental economics, with an increasing focus on the role finance can play in shaping climate adaptation and mitigation.  He focuses on the economic impacts of climate change on labor supply, land use, and international conflict, and how these can be mitigated through policies.

At the University of Graz, he will collaborate with Ilona Otto's Social Complexity & System Transformation research group. His research will focus on whether there has been a tipping point in the financial sector towards increased awareness of climate change and the need in finance to respond to the associated challenges. In addition, Timothy ich will address the extent to which finance has the potential to influence climate action in the broader economy. This project will build on ongoing work with colleagues at KCL on the changing role of sustainable finance and how regulators are responding to the increasing scope of so-called "sustainable" and "climate-related" finance.

Jakob Steiner received his PhD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2021 and has since been working at the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in the Hindu Kush Himalaya. With a background in hydrology and hydraulic engineering, his research primarily revolves around process understandings in mountain hydrology, changes in the cryosphere in the mountains as well as in the Arctic, and natural hazards in the high mountains. In the context of climate risks, he prefers to work in research teams composed of scientists from different disciplines. He has published on migration and is currently working mainly on the characterization of transnational climate risks in mountain areas and the possible national adaptation strategies.

During his fellowship at the University of Graz, he will create one of the first comprehensive databases of proglacial lakes and their sediment regime. While it is well known that lake areas are increasing with glacial melt, and an increasing hazard potential is inferred from this, we hardly know how much lakes are filled with sediment eroded by glaciers. At the interface of cryospheric research and numerical modeling of debris flows, this work allows a better estimation of the evolution of risks in high mountains. Furthermore, he will work on an already ongoing project on the ice margin in Greenland with partners in Graz.