Team

Our team worked on the Whakahura programme between 2019 and 2024. See the team and how to contact us below.

At the leading edge of relevant research fields, our team and our overseas partners were uniquely placed to develop new frontiers building upon the latest knowledge of climate change and extreme weather science.

This work encompassed the detection and attribution of climate change, climate change emergence, disaster economics, and mātauranga Māori.

Contact us

If you’d like to talk with us about the Whakahura project, feel free to get in touch.

Nienke Kloppenburg profile-picture photograph

Nienke Kloppenburg

Whakahura project manager

Senior leadership team

Professor of Physics, University of Canterbury
Whakahura research director

Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change
School of Economics and Finance

Science lead on Vision Mātauranga
Ngāti Porou

Director of Bodeker Scientific
Science lead on research aim 1.2

Climate scientist (NIWA)
Science lead on research aim 1.4

International collaborators

CountryScientists
Australia
  • Pandora Hope (Bureau of Meteorology)
  • Andrew King (Melbourne University)
  • Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick (University of New South Wales)

Austria

  • Reinhard Mechler (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis)

Japan

  • Hideo Shiogama (National Institute for Environmental Studies)

Switzerland

  • Christian Huggel (University of Zurich)
  • Eric Strobl (University of Bern)
South Africa
  • Kamoru Lawal (University of Cape Town)
  • Piotr Wolsk (University of Cape Town)
UK
  • Nikos Christidis (Met Office, UK)
  • Ed Hawkins (University of Reading)
  • Manoj Joshi (University of East Anglia)
  • Scott Osprey (Oxford University)
  • Friederike Otto (Oxford University)
  • Sarah Sparrow (Oxford University)
  • Peter Stott (Met Office/Eupheme)
  • Swenja Surminski (London School of Economics)
USA
  • Carolyn Kousky (Wharton School)
  • Mark Risser (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory)
  • Michael Wehner (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory)