Janne Parviainen

Janne is a Research Fellow at SEI Oxford, working at the intersection of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

Combining anthropology, participatory methods, and systems theory, his work advances the development of transdisciplinary, locally led interventions for risk reduction and management. He is particularly interested in understanding and reframing interactions between nature and culture to examine how socio-economic issues exacerbate both exposure and vulnerability to environmental risk.

He is also involved in research seeking to improve the equity outcomes of climate financing. As part of this research agenda, he is working with international financiers to strengthen mechanisms for financing locally led adaptation.  

In addition, he is an editor of content addressing disasters and migration-related issues on the weADAPT knowledge base.

Prior to joining SEI in 2023, Janne worked as a consultant in projects across Asia and the Pacific, where he focused on the issues of vulnerability, climate-adaptive risk management, and policy. His work involved research and policy engagement to support holistic risk reduction programming. He also led a project and co-authored country reports on the status of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation in 22 nations of the region. He has worked to assess the effectiveness of community-based disaster risk reduction programs implemented in East Asia and the Pacific between 2014 and 2022. 

Janne has an MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, where his interests gravitated toward environmental anthropology, critical social theory, and the anthropology of development. He also holds a BSc in Disaster Management from Coventry University, where his dissertation explored the vulnerability outcomes of fiscal structural adjustment programs on herder groups of Mongolia between 1990 and 2010.