Kees van der Geest

Kees van der Geest (PhD) is a human geographer who studies the impacts of climate change, adaptation, human mobility, environmental change, livelihood resilience and rural development. A key feature of his work is the people-centred perspective and the mixed-method approach combining quantitative and qualitative research tools. His work has contributed substantially to expanding the empirical evidence base on migration-environment linkages and impacts of climate change beyond adaptation (“loss and damage”). Kees has extensive fieldwork experience, mostly in Ghana (5 years), but also in Burkina Faso, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nepal, Marshall Islands and Bolivia. He coordinated research in many other countries across the Global South. Since 2012 he has been working as senior researcher at United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn (UNU-EHS). In 2019 he became Head of the Migration and Environment Section. From 2014 to 2017 he co-organized the Resilience Academy, which is a network of approximately 100 young professionals working on resilience, loss and damage, and human mobility in the context of global environmental change. Kees studied at the University of Amsterdam (human geography) and a semester at the University of Sussex (migration studies). His Master’s thesis and PhD thesis were published as monographs by the African Studies Centre. Several chapters of his PhD thesis about migration-environment linkages have been published in international journals, like International Migration, Environment and Urbanization, Africa and Forced Migration Review. Two of these articles are in the top-50 of most influential articles on the relation between migration and the environment according to ISI web of knowledge.
Supervisors: Dirk Messner, Koko Warner, and Ton Dietz