02/25/2011 - Rice yields and electricity demand – these are two topics Max Auffhammer hopes to make good progress on while staying at PIK. Being a resource economist, he focuses on the distributional impacts of climate change. Auffhammer is a professor at the University of California in Berkeley and known for numerous seminal contributions to the science of environmental change. A fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, he chose PIK to spend a sabbatical which started this February. “PIK’s reputation as a world leader in climate impact research made this an easy choice”, he says. “I was very much attracted by the interdisciplinary group of scholars here.”
The fellowship to him means having access to a worldwide network. “It creates an academic connection back to Germany, which otherwise would be hard to maintain alone.” Auffhammer himself was born in Hof/Saale and finished his A-levels there. He has two passports now, US and German. But “football to me is played by a team of 11, bread is made from rye flour and I speak to my two year old son in German.”
Auffhammer currently also works as a lead author for the next IPCC report. He contributes to the chapter on detection and attribution of observed impacts of climate change, coordinated by Wolfgang Cramer, co-chair of PIK-research domain Earth System Analysis.
