Kick Off in Berlin
Berlin, 26th and 27th of May 2025:
Katharina Zimmermann and her team at the University of Hamburg hosted the Kick Off Event for the WELRISCC project – our new research project aiming to explore the responses of European welfare states to social risks in times of climate change.
A platform for collaboration
Held at the GLS Campus in Berlin, the project brought together the WELRISCC project-, cooperation and associated partners from all over Europe. The event served as a platform to discuss the project’s analytical framework and the synergies between the six research strands within the project, which were represented by the project partners from the six work package teams. These cover a range of key dimensions of the regulation of eco-social risks, including their distribution, politicization and institutionalization. The event furthermore aimed to provide space for developing collaborations plans between the core research projects, and the research cooperation partners and associated civil society partners who form part of the project’s consortium.
Katharina Zimmermann (on the right) talking to partners
Katharina Zimmermann, the project lead, introduced the event by highlighting the collaborative foundations of the WELRISCC project. This offers a unique opportunity to jointly examine welfare state responses to the most pressing societal challenge of our time. She furthermore presented the project’s two-year structure which is now starting with a first phase of work package research, followed by a case study phase, and will conclude in 2027 with a synthesis phase.
Research structure
The case study component of the WELRISCC project was another central discussion point at the Kick Off. Larissa Nenning, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, presented the project’s aim of providing a systematic country case study database of eco-social risk management in 16 European countries. The case study research will be coordinated by the Hamburg team, headed by Katharina Zimmermann, and developed and conducted in collaboration with all the WELRISCC partners. It will gather a unique knowledge base for comparative analysis, which will become an open access database after three years.
Over the two days, the Kick Off participants engaged in discussions about the different guiding research questions and methodologies of the six different work packages. This included discussions on how to examine the ways in which environmental risk exposure and vulnerabilities relate to responses to direct eco-social risks, and how this interacts with variations in existing institutions of social risk management. Participants also deliberated on how to study how different inequality structures and cultural cleavages that shape risk exposure, vulnerabilities and interest structures relate to responses to direct and indirect eco-social risks. Attendees furthermore shared their national perspectives on the matter, highlighting the complexity due to different institutional legacies and territorial vulnerabilities.
More to come
The Kick Off concluded with a collective sense of purpose and anticipation for future research outputs. A series of further internal meetings, as well as events and publications are planned for the duration of the project to support research progress, and engage with other researchers and stakeholders outside of academia. The next full team meeting will take place in Ljubljana in 2026.