The award recognizes his work on Evaluating Flood Resilience Strategies for Coastal Megacitie (published earlier this year in Science), jointly undertaken with Jeroen Aerts, Wouter Botzen and Hans de Moel (VU University, Amsterdam), Kerry Emanuel (MIT) and Ning Lin (Princeton University).

In this work, Dr. Michel-Kerjan and his colleagues performed a full cost-benefit analysis of resilience strategies to protect large coastal megacities against storm surge, today and in the future, and applied their new methodology to New York City. The jury recognized an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to building resilience and the measuring of return on investment, which could potentially be deployed around the world.