Jannis Hoch

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, specialising in large-scale hydrology, flood modelling, and societal impacts of natural hazards. To study these elements, I use various modelling approaches together with a wide range of researchers. By combining climate forcing with hydrological models and crop growth models, I aim to investigate how changes in flood and drought magnitude and frequency may impact the agricultural productivity in African basins. This information may, in turn, be used to develop financial measures to increase local resilience against climate change. The ARISE projects is a consortium led by Imperial College London together with CIRAD and Ecole Polytechnique Paris.

In addition to that, I developed CoPro, an open-source data-driven framework for projecting conflict risk as function of socio-economic and hydro-climatic change. With CoPro, I used machine learning models to analyze how various socio-economic indicators (eg GDP or population count) and hydro-climatic indicators (eg precipitation or soil moisture) influence future conflict risk and to what extent. Furthermore, the model was used to produce estimates of future risk of armed conflict under various SSP-RCP scenarios. This work is in close collaboration with PBL, the Environmental Assessment Agency of the Netherlands.