Detlef P. van Vuuren

Detlef van Vuuren (1970) is a Professor of Integrated Assessment of Global Environmental Change at Utrecht University’s Faculty of Geosciences and a senior researcher at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, where he leads the IMAGE integrated assessment modelling team. He has published more than 440 articles in peer-reviewed journals, including high profile journals such as Nature and Science. He is among a small group of people worldwide who are listed as ‘highly cited researcher’ in three disciplines simultaneously and was listed by Reuters as the 4th most influential climate scientist. Detlef van Vuuren’s work focuses on global sustainability issues. With his team, he develops models to explore future climate and environmental changes through scenarios (i.e. projections of the future). The use of models allows accounting for the interaction between the economy and climate, land use and other environmental parameters, across geographic scales and over time. He is deputy editor of the scientific journal Climatic Change (a leading interdisciplinary journal on climate change) and participates in the editorial boards of Earth System Dynamics, Global Environmental Change and Environmental Review Letters - Climate. Detlef van Vuuren had a coordinating role in the development of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) and subsequent Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), now used in the IPCC’s assessments. He led several international research projects, including the EU Funded PATHWAYS, COMMIT, ELEVATE and CIRCOMOD projects and participated in the scientific steering group of more than 15 other European research projects. He participated as Coordinating Lead Author and Lead Author in more than 15 scientific assessments, such as the 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of IPCC, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook, the International Assessment on Agricultural Science and Technology Development, and the OECD Environmental Outlook.