Maarten van Aalst is Director of the international Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and holds the Princess Margriet Chair in Climate and Disaster Resilience at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente. He also has an adjunct appointment at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.
Prof van Aalst is Coordinating Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and servef on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group of UNDRR, the Leadership Group of the UN Climate Resilience Initiative A2R, the Steering Group of the Partners for Resilience alliance, and advisory boards of several international research programmes on climate risk management.
After completing a PhD in atmospheric science at Utrecht University and the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, he worked on climate change adaptation and disaster risk management with the World Bank, regional development banks, the OECD, and several governments.