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As a social anthropologist, my current research and writing focuses on climate change and how it affects our lives, landscapes, and ways of making worlds. This work grew out of a long-standing interest in human–environment relations, from the rise of ecology and nature conservation to today's concern with climate change. What does it mean to be human in a world of permanent transition? How do our perceptions of nature, our forms of knowledge, and our modes of production change – and how can we respond?

I have explored these questions in very different environments: in the Swiss Alps, in Portugal, along the German North Sea coast and other European coastlines. Much of this research has been conducted in close cooperation with climate scientists, ecologists and geographers, but also with the people who inhabit, administer, protect, use and transform these landscapes.

In national and European interdisciplinary projects, I have represented perspectives from anthropology and the humanities. A recurring concern in my work is the tendency to reduce environmental problems to matters of technocratic management. Instead, I argue for forms of science that acknowledge conflicts, interests and different ways of knowing, and that become part of democratic processes rather than standing outside them. I have pursued this approach in research on conflicts over nature conservation, on climate services and local climate action, and, most recently, on the rewilding of European coastlines.

During my career, I have worked at the University of Hamburg, the Institue for Coastal Systems (Hereon), and the University of Texas. Since 2017, I have been based at the artec Sustainability Research Center at the University of Bremen. I was a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and co-founded both the climate blog Die Klimazwiebel and the citizens' initiative Klimamarkt Ammerland. Alongside my academic work, I write for cargo and other journals and magazines for a wider public.