I am working as a scientist and science writer within the Planetary Boundary Science Initiative (PBScience) at PIK - a rapidly growing project with the ambitious goal of comprehensively assessing the health of our planet, by producing annual updates of the Planetary Boundaries framework. We presented our first Planetary Health Check Report to the public in September 2024, which can be downloaded at planetaryhealthcheck.org.
In parallel, I am writing my PhD thesis on a contagion- and network based understanding of Social Tipping processes in the sustainability context. Supervised by Dr. Jonathan Donges and Prof. Dr. Ricarda Winkelmann, my PhD project is aimed at combining insights from complex contagion, collective behavior, and social transformation research, and implementing both data- and simulation-based methods.
My PhD project has been funded and organized in the context of the interdisciplinary Young Academy of Geo.X, the geoscientific competence network in Berlin and Potsdam. At PIK, my work is embedded in the Whole Earth System Analysis Theme of the Earth Resilience Science Unit (ERSU), investigating the coevolution of natural and socio-economic subsystems of the Earth system in the Anthropocene. I am also a member of the copan collaboration at PIK, as well as the Earth Resilience and Sustainability Initiative (ERSI) partnership with Princeton University and the Stockholm Resilience Center (SRC).
Department
Working Group
FutureLab / Science Unit
Contact
14412 Potsdam
ORCID
- Planetary Boundaries
- Social Tipping Points relevant for decarbonization and other sustainability transformations
- (Social/complex) contagion and spreading processes on complex networks
- The role of urban systems in the global sustainability transformation
- Explainable AI methods for data analysis
Outside of academic journals:
Caesar*, L., Sakschewski*, B., Andersen, L.S., Beringer, T., Braun, J., Dennis, D., Gerten, D., Heilemann, A., Kaiser, J., Kitzmann, N.H., Loriani, S., Lucht, W., Ludescher,, J., Martin, M., Mathesius, S., Paolucci, A., te Wierik, S., Rockström, J. (2024):
"Planetary Health Check Report 2024"
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Germany.
(*equal contributors to this work and designated as co-first authors)
https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/
Climate tipping elements:
Möller, T., Högner, A.E., Schleussner, C-F., Bien, S., Kitzmann, N.H., Lamboll, R.D., Rogelj, J., Donges, J.F., Rockström, J., Wunderling, N:
"Achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions critical to limit climate tipping risks"
Nature Communications 15, 6192 (2024).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49863-0Show more detail
"10 Must Haves" for a just, sustainable future:
Schlosser, P., Rockström, J., Edwards, C., Mirazo, P., Heilemann, A., Kitzmann, N.H., Krobjinski, S. L.:
"Accelerating transformations for a just, sustainable future: 10 ‘Must Haves’"
Global Sustainability 6, e17 (2023).
https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2023.14
Detection of (urban innovation) social contagion:
Niklas H. Kitzmann, Pawel Romanczuk, Nico Wunderling and Jonathan F. Donges:
"Detecting contagious spreading of urban innovations on the global city network"
European Physical Journal - Special Topics 231, 1609–1624 (2022).
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-022-00470-4 (2021)
Jonathan F. Donges*, Jakob H. Lochner*, Niklas H. Kitzmann, Jobst Heitzig, Sune Lehmann, Marc Wiedermann and Jürgen Vollmer:
"Dose–response functions and surrogate models for exploring social contagion in the Copenhagen Networks Study"
European Physical Journal - Special Topics 230, 3311–3334 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjs/s11734-021-00279-7
* The first two authors share the lead authorship
Machine learning methods for non-linear data analysis:
In the context of the German Year of Science (Wissenschaftsjahr 2024 - Freiheit), I helped produce a short film about the intersection between Freedom and planetary stability, called Unsere Erde, Unsere Freiheit. The film can be viewed on Youtube, and is being screened by a number of partners, within the Wissenschaftsjahr and beyond. If you are interested in showing the film, or co-operating in other ways, please reach out to my colleague Lotta Bergfeld and me.
