Areas of Expertise
- Climate change impacts and risks
- Hydrological modeling
- Water resources management
- Model development, data analysis and visualization
Short Bio
Dr. Stefan Liersch is a senior research fellow in DGAP’s Center for Climate and Foreign Policy where he focuses on climate-induced migration and the biophysical aspects of habitability in the context of climate change. He is also a senior scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
Since 2009, Liersch has conducted research in the Hydroclimatic Risks group at PIK, specializing in the integrated analysis of human-ecological systems and their evolution under global and climate change. Through various international and interdisciplinary projects, he has gained extensive experience in project coordination, scenario co-development, and capacity building in collaboration with local stakeholders. His work focuses on systems thinking within the water-energy-food nexus and on bridging scales by translating climate change projections and impacts from the global scale to regional and local contexts.
Through his work on projects across the African continent, Liersch came to recognize that the challenges posed by climate change cannot be understood solely through a natural science lens. Today, his work is driven by a commitment to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that integrates scientific, societal, and practical perspectives.
Liersch studied geoecology at the University of Potsdam and earned his doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) with a dissertation on environmental management and the integration of local knowledge at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU).
Languages
German, English
[Last updated: October 2026]
