Prof. Dr Ilona Otto is the newly appointed Professor of Societal Impacts of Climate Change at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change at the University of Graz. There she leads a new research group focusing on social complexity and system transformation. The group's aim is to use complex systems theory and novel research methods to analyse dynamic social processes and interventions that can trigger the rapid social change needed to fundamentally transform the interactions between human societies and nature over the next 30 years.
Prof. Otto is a trained social scientist. She completed a doctoral programme in resource economics at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, and a master's degree in sociology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She also studied at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and the National University of Ireland in Galway. She worked as a research associate at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany, and at the Institute for Forecasting of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia.
Prof. Otto uses a range of research methods, including social surveys, case studies, behavioural experiments, and simulations, to analyse issues related to global environmental change, development, adaptation, and sustainability. Prof. Otto is a project partner in the EU Horizon 2020 project CASCADES: Cascading climate risks: Towards adaptive and resilient European Societies. She was a project partner in the WaterLab project: River Basin Management Games Supporting Adaptation to Climate Change and Public Participation, funded by the Chinese Science Foundation, and led a project commissioned by the World Bank on modelling the impacts of climate change on poverty at the subnational level. In her early postdoctoral research, she held a Marie Curie fellowship and investigated the governance of water and biodiversity in the enlarged EU. In her doctoral thesis, she analysed factors influencing improved cooperation in agricultural markets. She is a dedicated university teacher and lecturer on the impacts of climate change and sustainable transformation.
