Anders Levermann

Anders Levermann is a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Columbia University. He is a Professor of the Dynamics of the Climate System at Institute for Physics and Astrophysics of the Potsdam University, Germany. He was a lead author of the chapter on sea-level changes of the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5), and contributed to the paleoclimate chapter in the previous report (IPCC-AR4). Levermann advises political and economic stakeholders on the issue of climate change.

Born in 1973 in Bremerhaven, Germany, Anders Levermann studied physics at Germany's Marburg University. After his prediploma he completed his Civil Service at psychiatric hospital ‘Givat Shaul’ in Jerusalem, Israel. Afterwards he completed his studies in physics at Kiel University, Germany, where he received his diploma in 1999. During his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel (with Minerva scholarship) he worked on fractal growth patterns with Professor Itamar Procaccia.

Levermann received his PhD in theoretical physics in 2003, after which he started to work on climate dynamics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Initially as a Postdoc with a scholarship of Gary-Comer-foundation, he became junior professor in 2006. Since October 2007, he has been a senior researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a Professor of the Dynamics of the Climate System at Physics Institute of Potsdam University, Germany. He has made several research visits to countries including USA, India, China and Australia. His research focuses on tipping elements of the climate system.

He was one of the lead authors of the chapter on sea-level change in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since 2012 he has been leading the research domain on sustainable solutions of the climate problem at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, working together with PIK's chief-economist Prof. Ottmar Edenhofer. In some newspaper articles, e.g. in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Guardian, he hypothesized that there is a limit to the adaptive capacity of our current society. In a commentary in the scientific journal Nature, he therefore called for a publicly available information system to induce a "global adaptation" of our supply chains (www.zeean.net).