P.j. Ward
Professor
Environmental Economics
Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM)
Netherlands
Biography
Dr Philip Ward is Deputy Head of the Department of Water and Climate Risk at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). He is an Assistant Professor, and leads his own research program on Global Water and Climate Risk. Since 2012 he has been a guest researcher at Deltares, and in 2013-2014 he was a visiting scientist at Columbia University in New York. His current research focuses on flood and drought risk assessment at the global and continental scale. In the last few years, Philip has developed models to assess these risks today and in the future, as well as methods to assess the effectiveness and feasibility of flood risk reduction strategies. His research fuses high-level scientific impact with key societal questions, and searches for solutions to global environmental challenges. He has authored more than 45 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, including 4 in Nature Climate Change and 2 in PNAS. He is convener of several major sessions on large scale flood and natural hazard risk, including those at the European Geosciences Union, the American Geophysical Union, and the World Bank GFDRR’s Understanding Risk forum. In 2011, Philip was awarded a VENI grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to conduct research on El Niño Southern Oscillation’s influence on flood risk worldwide. Through this project, he developed the state-of-the-art global flood risk assessment model GLOFRIS, which is used by a large range of stakeholders and decision makers, including the World Bank, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, OECD, UN-HABITAT, and several reinsurance companies. He also developed the online web-tool Aqueduct Global Flood Analyzer with the World Resources Institute and Deltares. Currently, he leads work packages or tasks in several EU-funded international research projects: IMPREX, eartH2Observe, and RISES-AM. He has been awarded grants/projects from agencies including NWO, European Commission, World Bank, FAO, Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, KNAW, Knowledge for Climate, Climate changes Spatial Planning, and Deltares. Dr Ward coordinates, or teaches in, courses at Masters and Bachelors level on: Integrated Modelling in Hydrology; Tools in Environmental Resource Management; Risk Assessment; Water Policy; and Thesis Writing. He is currently adviser to 7 PhD students.
Research Interest
Flood risk, water resources management, drought risk, hydrology, global modelling, storm surge modelling, GIS, climate change impacts; climate variability impacts, climate-water interaction.
Publications
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Veldkamp, T. I. E., Wada, Y., Aerts, J. C. J. H., Döll, P., Gosling, S. N., Liu, J., ... Ward, P. J. (2017). Water scarcity hotspots travel downstream due to human interventions in the 20th and 21st century. Nature Communications, 8, 1-12. [15697]. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15697
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Budiyono Y, Marfai MA, Aerts JCJH, de Moel H, Ward PJ. Flood risk in polder systems in Jakarta: present and future analyses. In Disaster Risk Reduction in Indonesia: Progress, Challenges, and Issues. Springer. 2017. p. 517.
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Haer T, Botzen WJW, Zavala-Hidalgo J, Cusell C, Ward PJ. Economic evaluation of climate risk adaptation strategies: Cost-benefit analysis of flood protection in Tabasco, Mexico. Atmosfera. 2017 Feb 1;101. doi: 10.20937/ATM.2017.30.02.03.
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A global framework for future costs and benefits of river-flood protection in urban areas Ward, P. J., Jongman, B., Aerts, J. C. J. H., Bates, P., Botzen, W. J. W., Diaz Loaiza, M. A., Hallegatte, S., Kind, J. M., Kwadijk, J., Scussolini, P. & Winsemius, H. C. 2017 In : Nature Climate Change.
