Prof. Dr. Roshanka (Rosh) Ranasinghe holds the AXA Chair in Climate Change Impacts and Coastal Risk at the Department of Coastal and Urban Risk & Resilience, IHE Delft and at the Department of Water Engineering and Management, University of Twente. He is also a Senior Specialist at the Reslient Ports and Coasts department (Hydraulic Engineering Unit) at Deltares and holds an Honorary Professor position at the University of Melbourne (Australia).
Rosh obtained his Bachelor of Science Engineering (1st Class Honours) from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka in 1993 and his PhD in Coastal Engineering and Oceanography from the Centre for Water Research, University of Western Australia in 1998. Since then he has worked in the Academic and government sectors in Australia, USA and The Netherlands.
To date, Rosh has published over 200 peer reviewed articles and delivered numerous presentations around the world. He is regularly invited to provide expert advice on adaptation to climate change and coastal zone management by national and local governments and international agencies.
Rosh has supervised/co-supervised 10 Post-doctoral fellows, 20+ PhD candidates and numerous MSc students to date and has lead several capacity development projects in Sri Lanka, India, VietNam, Thailand, Sao Tome and Principe.
He actively contributes to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) process and is a member of the IPCC AR7 Scoping Team. Rosh was Coordinating Lead Author in Chapter 12, a lead author of the Summary for Policy Makers, and contributing author in Chapters 9, 11 and Atlas of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). He was also a Contributing Author in the IPCC Special report on Oceans and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC).
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.
Research Interests
- Quantification of climate change impacts on coasts
- Development of quantitative coastal risk assessment techniques
- Development of reduced complexity and probabilistic models to simulate long term ( ~ 100 years) coastal change
- Strategic application of process based models to assess climate change impacts on coasts
- Understanding medium term coastal morphodynamic phenomena such as tidal inlet closure/migration, rip-bar morphodynamics, sand bar dynamics via numerical modelling, field data and video imaging
- Development of rapid assessment techniques to predict medium-long term coastline response to engineering interventions