Dr. Liang Emlyn Yang
Dr. Liang Emlyn Yang (杨也明) is a senior researcher at the Department of Geography, LMU Munich and an affiliated Research Associate at Harvard University. His work investigates how human and social systems build, sustain, and enhance resilience to climate change. He frames climate resilience through a lens of optimism that highlights adaptability, innovation, and positive human–climate relations.
Dr. Yang’s research spans China, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Nepal and Germany, drawing on historical perspectives over the past 5,000 years. He employs a wide range of methods—household surveys, expert interviews, stakeholder network analysis, agent-based modeling, GIS and machine learning—to analyse the dynamics of climate change impacts and social resilience. He has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed publications on climate change adaptation, floods, urbanization, sustainability and historical geography. He is lead editor of Socio-Environmental Dynamics along the Historical Silk Road (Springer, 2019) and contributor to China – Geographien einer Weltmacht (Springer, 2023). He has managed and coordinated over ten international projects and currently leads the ERC-funded STORIES project on the spatial-temporal dynamics of flood resilience in the Mekong River Basin. Beyond research, he convenes international conferences, sits on editorial boards, reviews for leading journals and the IPCC, and fosters global knowledge exchange through Climate Resilience networks and webinars.