Mikael Allan Mikaelsson is a Policy Fellow at SEI Headquarters with the International Climate Risk and Adaptation team.
Mikael’s work focuses on transboundary climate risks and their impact on the global economy and wider society through international networks and interdependences, such as trade and supply chain networks. Transboundary climate risk refers to how climate impacts in one part of the world might affect economies and societies elsewhere. He is particularly interested in examining the state of knowledge and preparedness among public and private-sector actors across Europe and beyond to manage the risks from these cascading climate impacts, with the aim to design governance frameworks, policies and measures, which in concert, will build greater resilience to these effects of climate change.
Mikael is also part of the European Topic Centre on Climate Change (ETC-CC) that provides thematic expertise to the European Environment Agency in the area of climate change and reports on progress of EU environmental policy on climate change issues. As part of the ETC-CC work, he assess the implication of EU policies on Europe’s climate resilience and how climate change impacts will affect EU policy aims and objectives.
Mikael has nine years of professional experience working on climate change at the intersection of science, technological innovation and international relations. Prior to SEI he worked for the UK Government’s international science and innovation division under the auspices of the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, where he led the division’s involvement in COP26 and its regional work on net-zero transition and climate change in Europe and beyond. In this role, he was responsible for forging new and strengthening existing UK-European S&I collaboration around evidence-based climate policy, net-zero transition and research-driven climate adaptation.
In 2022, Mikael was appointed as an honorary Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE), conferred by Her Majesty Queen of the United Kingdom, in recognition of his service to international collaboration on climate change. He has a PhD in Behavioral and Neural Genetics from Cardiff University, an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Bristol, and a BSc in Psychology from the University of Iceland.