UGEC is pleased to announce the appointments of two new members to our SSC: Dr. Patricia Romero-Lankao, Climate Science and Applications Program RAL/ISP, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA and Dr. Dagmar Haase, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Department of Computational Landscape Ecology, Germany.

Dr. Romero-Lankao has developed research on the interactions between urban development and global environmental change and is very active in both the international human dimensions community and the human dimensions community of US and Latin America. She has focused her research on crucial intersections between urban development and the environment, including the carbon cycle, the climate system and the water cycle. In particular, she has studied key issues of (a) how urban development impacts the environment (drivers); (b) what societal factors explain cities' vulnerability/resilience to heat waves, atmospheric pollution, water scarcity and pollution, among other hazards (impacts), and (c) how particular cities attempt to meet the challenges of reducing emissions while improving their capacity to cope with environmental impacts (responses).

Dr. Haase is (since 2000) a member of the scientific staff of the Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in the Department of Applied Landscape Ecology and co-ordinates (since 2003) research work on urban modelling and monitoring at the Department. In this field, her research specialty is spatially explicit modelling of household driven land use changes and urban shrinkage. She also studies the environmental effects of urban land use change such as flood impact and risk assessment, recreational and habitat functions of urban greenery. Dr. Haase is engaged in the EU IP PLUREL as module leader for the sustainability assessment modelling of land use changes at the regional level. She is also engaged in the work on urban flood risk assessment within the FLOODsite EU IP and coordinates the Tisza River Basin Case Study in the NeWater EU IP, which focuses on conceptual and system dynamics modelling and qualitative mapping to mitigate urban flood issues.

We welcome these two dynamic individuals and are looking forward to the expertise they will bring to the committee!