The co-sponsors of the IRDR, the global progamme on Integrated Research on Disaster Risk – ICSU, ISSC and UNISDR – are pleased to announce the appointment of a new Executive Director, Dr Rüdiger Klein. He is a German national, who is currently based in Amsterdam. Before joining the programme, Dr Klein was at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he served inter alia as Director of the European Federation of National Academies (ALLEA), leading a number of European science policy initiatives. Earlier he had been responsible for interdisciplinary collaborative research programmes and for a portfolio “research and foresight” at the European Science Foundation in France, after long years of research and science diplomacy missions carried out in the Middle East and North Africa region, Western and South Asia. Dr Klein is expected to take up his new post on 1 July.

The IRDR International Programme Office (IPO) is based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute for Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI). Dr. Klein is shown here at the signing ceremony with IRDR Science Committee (SC) Chair Professor David Johnston and Director-General of RADI, Professor Huadong Guo on the occasion of the 2nd IRDR Conference “Integrated Disaster Risk Science: A Tool for Sustainability”. Attending the IRDR Science Committee and associated science meetings in Beijing, Rüdiger Klein expressed his appreciation for the continued support the IPO receives from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST).