Junko Mochizuki

Junko Mochizuki is an experienced researcher working the areas of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction with skills in policy analysis, proposal writing, project management and stakeholder engagement.

Currently, Mochizuki is a technical assistance advisor on climate change at the International Monetary Fund. She also serves part-time as a senior research scholar in the Water Security Research Group of the IIASA Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program.

Her current assignment at IIASA focuses on advancing the macroeconomic and fiscal modeling of natural disaster risk for both developed and developing countries. This entails exploring the empirical linkages between fiscal risk management, economic growth, and changes in climate extreme risks and other socioeconomic variables over time. Her particular interest lies in the interface between policy and scientific knowledge – investigating barriers and enablers for risk reduction actions at the fiscal and macroeconomic planning levels. In addition to conducting integrated risk assessments, she has also led a number of capacity building workshops for developing country policy stakeholders, focusing on macroeconomic risk management and probabilistic cost-benefit analysis of disaster risk reduction investment.

Prior to joining IIASA, she was a PhD degree fellow at the East-West Center/University of Hawaii in the USA, where she received her doctoral degree in Natural Resources and Environmental Management (NREM) and a graduate certificate in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance (DMHA). She completed an MSc degree in Global Agricultural Sciences at the University of Tokyo in 2006, and graduated magna cum laude from the University of California Irvine with a BA in political science in 2001.