Dr. Liang Emlyn YANG is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Chair of Human Geography, Department of Geography, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU). He is also an Affiliated Research Associate (Visiting Scholar) at Harvard University in the US.

Dr. YANG’s research explores the resilience of human-social systems to climate change impacts. He is particularly interested in how societies build and sustain resilience against environmental and climate threats. Another interest is in the assessment and modeling of resilience achievement, progress and potential. His work emphasizes successful cases, demonstrates significant progress, and showcases the wide array of solutions, technologies, and strategies that enables resilient development. He frames climate resilience through a hopeful lens that underscores human potential, adaptability, and innovation, and fosters a narrative of optimism of human-climate relations against the backdrop of risk and crisis discourses. Besides the specific and technical work, Dr. Yang attempts to understand the fundamental, conceptual and theoretical issues of “resilience systems”.

Dr. YANG employs a diverse set of methodologies, including household surveys, expert interviews, stakeholder network analysis, agent-based modeling, geo-information system and data-driven machine learning. His research spans multiple global regions, including China, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Nepal, and Germany, with a historical perspective on social resilience over the past 5,000 years.

Dr. YANG won the prestigious ERC Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council (ERC) with a budget of 1.5 million Euro: STORIES – Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Flood Resilience. The project investigates the dynamic interactions of floods impacts and social resilience in the Mekong River basin with a historical view of the past millennium. He is the founder and manager of the Google Group Climate Resilience (2380 members globally) and the WeChat Group Climate Resilience (739 members of Chinese-speaking). A series of scientific webinars on the theme of climate resilience has been organized since October 2021.

Before joining LMU in 2019, Dr. YANG worked as a postdoc researcher for the ROOTS Cluster of Excellence at Kiel University. He obtained his PhD (2014) from the University of Hamburg in Germany. Before that, he studied land use and regional planning in the Southwest University in Chongqing, China, and finished a master program in Geography from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. He has extended fieldwork experience in China, Pakistan, Vietnam and short stays in a number of other countries, including the UK and US. Beyond academia, he has served as an external researcher at the MIT Climate CoLab and Project Drawdown, a fellow and mentor at the EU Climate-KIC, and a consultant for the World Future Council on regenerative urban development in China.

Dr. YANG has authored over 70 peer-reviewed publications covering climate change modeling, risk, vulnerability, adaptation, resilience, urbanization, floods, sustainability, and historical geography. He was the lead editor of Socio-Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road (Springer, 2019) and contributed to seven chapters of the German textbook China – Geographien einer Weltmacht (Springer, 2023). Dr. Yang has been leading the editing or co-editing five journal Special Issues, including the two in Global Environmental Change and Environmental Science and Policy. A full list of his publications is available on Google Scholar and ResearchGate. 

Dr. YANG can be contacted via emlyn.yang@lmu.de. More information is available on the webpage https://www.geo.lmu.de/geographie/de/personen/kontaktseite/liang-emlyn-yang-1473b4ca.html