asher.siebert@climateanalytics.org, asherb.siebert@gmail.com
Aspirations and Current Position
I am an interdisciplinary applied climate scientist seeking to develop innovative, user-informed adaptation strategies and data analysis to address climate risks across many sectors. Climate-related risks clearly impact many aspects of society. The convergence of climate change and increasing exposure of population, infrastructure and other assets to these risks pose a central challenge for our present world and the world that today’s children will inherit.
Between essential challenges to democracy, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, inflation and supply chain issues, the covid pandemic, the rise of artificial intelligence, and climate change, we are living through challenging, turbulent times. But we also are living at a time of tremendous potential to harness the capacity of the digital age for good. Climate tools, products and services can be tailored to meet user needs across a broad range of sectors (by using open source programming languages, powerful geographic visualization tools, digital dashboards in an interdisciplinary, collaborative manner).
I have spent my career and education seeking to understand and address many aspects of the climate challenge, sharing my knowledge with diverse audiences and trying to find practical responses to climate challenges – particularly for poor, vulnerable populations.
I have recently been hired by the company Climate Analytics as a Senior Scientist on Loss and Damage. I am honored and humbled to have this role. In this position, I will be leading teams of colleagues (with stakeholder contributors) to clearly assess climate risk, quantify climate-related loss and damage, to strengthen climate resilience and adaptability and to pursue appropriate financial resources for countries most at risk. Much of my work in this role focuses on small island developing states (SIDS) and least developed countries (LDCs).
Professional/Academic Background
Here is my CV page, my LinkedIn, Google Scholar, ResearchGate and ORCID profiles. I have a PhD in Geography (Rutgers), an MA in Climate and Society (Columbia) and a BA in Geosciences (Princeton). From 2016 to 2022, I was an employee of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University’s Climate School and I just finished participation in the fourth Cohort of the ClimateBase Fellowship.
My full CV has links to my peer reviewed publications, reports and many of my conference proceedings and refers to my teaching/academic, editing, training/stakeholder engagement roles and invited talks.
My work experience has involved loss and damage analysis, seasonal climate forecasting, climate scenario development and analytical work for applications in agriculture/food security, health, index (parametric) insurance and forecast-based financing (FbF) for humanitarian responses to emergencies. This work has mostly focused on addressing climate risks for communities in Africa, although my recent work at Climate Analytics has been focused on small island states in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Throughout my education and career, I have worked with climate data (temperature, rainfall, rainfall derived variables [rainy day frequency, dry spell length and seasonal start date], sea surface temperatures, streamflow, winds, geopotential height) from meteorological stations, satellites, reanalysis sources and global climate models. I’ve also worked with satellite derived vegetation indices (NDVI), water requirement satisfaction index (WRSI), agricultural production/yield data and vulnerability indicators, such as Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) for food insecurity. During both my time as an IRI employee and during my PhD research, I made extensive use of the many datasets archived on the IRI data library, which unfortunately is soon going to shut down. During my PhD research, I also analyzed global climate model data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) from the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF).
My and my colleagues’ work at Climate Analytics is funded mostly by UN and European Agencies and has included the NDC Partnership Action Fund (PAF), the United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, the Landlocked Developing Countries and the Small Island Developing States (OHRLLS), the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the International Climate Initiative (IKI) and Horizon Europe.
My and my colleagues’ work at IRI was funded by a range of international development, disaster relief, financial and scientific organizations (including the now sadly defunct US Agency for International Development (USAID), the World Bank, the World Food Program (WFP), UK Department for International Development (DfID), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Columbia World Projects (CWP) and has given me the opportunity to travel to Africa on multiple occasions.
In 2022, my work on a WFP sponsored forecast-based finance project (FbF) in Niger led to a nearly 10 million dollar payout of humanitarian aid through the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to respond to a severe early season drought in June and July. Here’s the press release. My forecasts for this project are accessible through the Niger FbF maproom page. Much of my recent work at IRI also focused on trying to forecast seasonal rainfall characteristics in Senegal and Ethiopia through close collaborations with their meteorological services, Agence Nationale de l’Aviation Civile et de la Météorologie (ANACIM) and Ethiopia’s National Meteorology Agency (NMA), through the CWP sponsored ACToday project. Here is the Senegal forecast maproom. During my postdoc at IRI, I was also very involved in a USAID sponsored climate change and food security (CCAFS) project in Rwanda and worked extensively with the meteorological service, MeteoRwanda and helped inform forecasts and services in their digital maproom. This work also led, in 2019, to a collaborative paper, published in the International Journal of Climatology, that examined Rwanda’s regional and seasonal climatology using high resolution merged satellite/station data. From the Rwandan genocide in the mid 1990s to about 2010, there were very few meteorological stations in operation in the country. By using this merged satellite/station data, this paper substantially addresses those data gaps and offers a more complete picture of the country’s climatology. Among senior IRI staff, I worked most closely with climate scientist Andrew Roberston, economist Daniel Osgood, climate and agriculture expert James Hansen, and climate data expert Tufa Dinku.
Prior to my recent time at IRI, I was a postdoc with the Princeton Environmental Institute (2015-2016) which has been renamed to the High Meadows Environmental Institute. My work there involved interdisciplinary collaboration with economists, public health experts, philosophers and engineers to understand the theoretical interplay between carbon taxation, emissions, climate-related economic and health impacts, economic distribution of those impacts and costs and population projections. This work was done using coupled climate-economy integrated assessment models (IAMs) – specifically a variant of the Regional Integrated Climate Economy (RICE) model developed by Yale economist William Nordhaus. Several papers emerged from this collaboration, but the group’s most highly cited paper, published in 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), made the argument that if we collectively expect that climate impacts will disproportionately hurt the poor, there is an economic argument in favor of rapid climate mitigation and decarbonization. My postdoc advisers at Princeton were engineer and physicist Robert Socolow and economist Marc Fleurbaey.
From 2009-January 2015, I was a PhD student at Rutgers. My PhD adviser was David Robinson, who is a professor of Geography, runs the Rutgers Global Snow Lab and is the NJ state climatologist. My dissertation focused on exploring the potential of drought index insurance as a climate adaptation tool in the context of climate change and decadal variability in West Africa. As a PhD student, I also worked closely with professors Robin Leichenko, Asa Rennermalm and Ken Mitchell, who were also on my general exam committee. I passed general exams in climatology, hydrology, climate adaptation and geography. I also worked closely with former IRI applied climate scientist Neil Ward both during my PhD and during my earlier employment at IRI. My coursework as a PhD student included more social science than earlier phases of my education. I also got the chance to do a fair amount of teaching as a PhD student (teaching summer courses in 2011 and 2012 and being a TA during the academic years from 2010-2013). In 2013, I won a dissertation teaching award, which gave me the opportunity to develop and teach an interdisciplinary upper level undergraduate course on climate and society in the spring of 2014. In 2012, my first paper, coauthored with Neil Ward (Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology) received the John R. Mather Paper of the Year Award from the Climate Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). This paper was based in part on work I had done during my earlier employment at IRI and formed the methodological framework for my dissertation.
Between 2006-2008, I was a staff associate at IRI working with Neil Ward. During this time, my and my colleagues’ work was funded by Swiss Reinsurance to develop drought index insurance contracts for the Millennium Villages Project in Africa. My colleagues and I developed index insurance contracts for twelve sites across ten countries across a wide range of agro-climatic environments and economies. Unfortunately, as the project ended during the 2008/9 financial crisis, donor support to fund the contracts was limited.
As an MA student at Columbia in 2005-2006, I was an intern working with NASA climate scientists Cynthia Rosenzweig and Radley Horton at the Center for Climate Systems Research (CCSR) at the NASA-GISS facility in New York doing scenario assessment work to help understand the vulnerability of New York City’s infrastructure to climate risks for a project sponsored by the NYCDEP. In the MA program, I took elective courses in climate and public health, climate and water, alternative energies, and complex humanitarian disasters, in addition to the core courses in climate science, quantitative methods and climate policy. My professors included Neil Ward (mentioned above), Mark Cane, Mingfang Ting, Upmanu Lall, Patrick Kinney, Kim Knowlton, Klaus Lackner, and Lisa Goddard, who sadly died far too young, but had a tremendous impact on the field of climate science, the IRI (as director from 2012-2020) and on her many students.
From 2002-2004, I was a physical oceanography graduate student in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) joint program. I had been studying the oceanic thermohaline circulation in that program, but left that program as my interests in climate change became more interdisciplinary.
From 1998-2002, I was an undergrad at Princeton where I majored in Geosciences. While my coursework in Geosciences dealt with topics in both solid Earth Science and fluid Earth Science, I focused a bit more on the latter, taking two graduate courses in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences program and orienting my undergraduate research towards topics in oceanography and climate. My senior thesis used ice core data from Bolivia (from an internship with Professor Lonnie Thompson at Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center) to assess how the frequency of El Nino events changed over the last several hundred years and to try to understand how the El Nino-Southern Oscillation pattern might respond to global climate change. I had the privilege to work more closely with several pioneering professors through independent study or undergraduate research: George Philander, Alexey Fedorov, Jorge Sarmiento, Jason Morgan and Anthony Dahlen.
Personal Background
I grew up in northern New Jersey. My father, a PhD in physical chemistry, was a professor and worked in the aerospace industry. My mother, a PhD in music/musicology, was a professor and then an arts council program director and grassroots environmental activist. My sister is an equity and venture funds lawyer. Professionally, most people in my extended family are lawyers, doctors, musicians, scholars and teachers.
My wife has a background in environmental policy (having worked for the EPA) and in public health. We have two wonderful little children: a six year old daughter and a four year old son. We love to explore nature and pursue enriching and artistic activities as a family.
Outside of work and family, I am an avocational/amateur musician (trumpet, piano, singing, and composition – in classical, klezmer and jazz styles) and have been musically involved since age 7. I have trained for many years in martial arts (starting with Karate and Tae Kwon Do a long time ago, before more recent training in Krav Maga, MMA/kickboxing, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu). I enjoy hiking, playing a number of sports (running, tennis, soccer, volleyball, softball), and being active in the Jewish community. I care deeply about and have donated to worthwhile environmental and social/economic justice oriented causes.
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