Daniel Puig - research profile

Profile

Education

PhD in climate change governance (Technical University of Denmark, 2020)

MSc in biological sciences (Autonomous University of Barcelona, 1992)

Career

2026 - present	University of Bergen (researcher, Bergen)
2022 - 2026	University of Bergen (postdoctoral fellow, Bergen)
2011 - 2022	Technical University of Denmark (senior advisor, Copenhagen)
2001 - 2011	United Nations Environment Programme (programme officer, Paris)
1996 - 2001	COWI Consulting Engineers and Planners (project manager, Kongens Lyngby)
1992 - 1995	Various research assistant positions, including a stint at Finland’s Water and Environment Research Institute

Editorial responsibilities

Associate Editor at Regional Environmental Change, where I mostly handle manuscripts focused on non-economic loss and damage and social limits to climate change adaptation.

Review Editor at Frontiers in Climate’s "Climate Risk Management", a journal indexed in Clarivate’s Web of Science and Elsevier’s Scopus databases.

Recent trainings

Course “Introduction to teaching and course design” (University of Bergen, 2025)

Summer School “Agent-based modelling” (University of Milan, 2024)

Course “PhD supervision” (Technical University of Denmark, 2021)

Memberships

Association of Critical Heritage Studies

Research stays

University of Tokyo (March-May 2025 — Tokyo, Japan)

Languages

Fluent: English, French and Spanish

Limited proficiency: Danish and Norwegian

Mother tongue: Catalan

Infrequently asked questions

Monthly reflections on incommensurable loss, prompted by media, research and fiction. These reflections may or may not have a direct linkage to climate change impacts — but they will always have at least an indirect connection.

APRIL 2026

Le Sanctuaire d’Ise - récit de la 62e reconstruction [The Ise Shrine - a chronicle of the 62nd reconstruction]

An academic book edited by Jean Sébastien Cluzel and Nishida Masatsugu Mardaga, 2015.

Ise Jingū is a Shinto shrine complex located in Japan’s Mie Prefecture. Although Shinto has no centralised doctrinal authority—and therefore no shrine hierarchy—the Ise Jingū shrine complex is, in every practical, historical and ritual sense, Shinto’s spiritual capital. In a cycle that began around 689–690 CE and has seen few interruptions (1), sixteen of the one hundred and twenty-five structures in the shrine complex are rebuilt every twenty years (2). Through a ritualised rebuilding process known as shikinen sengū (式年遷宮), ancient codified architectural standards are applied using traditional techniques to reproduce the structures’ archetypal forms. The purpose of rebuilding these structures every twenty years is to foster continuity, transmit embodied knowledge, reinforce social cohesion and materialise a worldview in which impermanence and renewal are sacred. The Izumo Taisha shrine, located in Japan's Shimane Prefecture, used to undergo a similar rebuilding process, though on a 60-year cycle. However, this cycle was interrupted multiple times, especially during periods of political and financial instability—and from the early modern period onward, the strict 60-year cycle fell out of consistent observance. These and similar examples are often used to illustrate the linkages between built and intangible heritage—especially by scholars who strongly uphold the importance of those linkages. Similarly, these examples highlight that the frequently asserted idea that heritage is in constant evolution does not necessarily hold: here, the societal purpose heritage invariably serves is fulfilled precisely through the maintenance of limited—or even no—change. Against this background, Kishiro Iida’s contribution to this edited volume is especially interesting. It reveals that, contrary to the commonly held belief, traditional techniques are not reproduced exactly as before (3). It follows that neither the preservation of material structures (the built heritage) nor the strict maintenance of traditional crafts (the intangible heritage) is indispensable for fulfilling the societal role served by the cyclical reconstruction process. Instead, shikinen sengū (式年遷宮), itself rooted in the Shinto concept of tokowaka (常若), or perpetual renewal as a path to eternal youth and spiritual vitality, constitutes the single continuous thread in a ritual now spanning more than thirteen centuries. Put simply, in the case of shikinen sengū (式年遷宮), as well as in other Shinto rituals—notably the o-miwatari (御神渡) ritual, held annually on the shores of Lake Suwa, in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture—material heritage and some aspects of intangible heritage both play a secondary role, relative to the spiritual—and thus intangible—component of the cultural manifestation concerned. In the context of religious traditions, is material heritage subservient to intangible heritage—thus signalling that the degree to which one type of heritage invests meaning in the other is not reciprocal? Is there an example of built heritage that would raise the reciprocal question—perhaps that of Gothic cathedrals during the High Middle Ages? (1) During the Warring States period (1463–1485) and again during the Allied Occupation after the Second World War (1949–1953). (2) These are: Naikū, the main inner shrine; Gekū, the main outer shrine; ten auxiliary shrines dedicated to the Sun Goddess; and four auxiliary shrines dedicated to the Food Goddess. (3) The reconstruction office refines these methods to improve durability while still seeking to preserve 'tradition'. New techniques are tested on samples and auxiliary shrines, and are adopted more wildly only once they have been approved by the Ise High Priest.

MARCH 2026

The Shepherd's Calendar

A calendar‑structured pastoral poem by John Clare, first published in 1827

John Clare (1793–1864) was a Romantic‑era English poet. Despite having limited formal education — he was born into poverty in Northamptonshire — Clare developed an extraordinary observational precision that allowed him to capture landscapes, wildlife, and the rhythms of agricultural communities with uncommon authenticity. His early success with Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery brought him brief fame. However, the growing loss of local dialects, traditional festivities, and rural crafts — caused chiefly by enclosure and rural depopulation — caused him profound distress and contributed to his declining mental health, leading to his eventual confinement in asylums. Through works such as The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Clare was perhaps the first of many writers who would chronicle the steady erosion of England’s rural traditions as depopulation reshaped the countryside. Across the Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist periods, authors documented the fading of intangible cultural heritage in different historical registers. For Romantic poets like Clare, loss appeared as an impending fatality—a looming erasure of dialects, seasonal customs, communal labour rhythms, and local lore. By the Victorian era, in the work of Thomas Hardy, William Barnes, and Elizabeth Gaskell, among others, that loss had become an established fact: traditional crafts, oral storytelling, and customary rights‑of‑way were already disappearing under enclosure, industrialization, and out‑migration. For Modernist figures such as D.H. Lawrence, Vita Sackville‑West, Edward Thomas, and Flora Thompson, the vanished rural world was nearly a thing of the past, recalled through nostalgia or elegy rather than active observation. Together, these writers trace the thinning of England’s rural cultural fabric—shared rituals, speech patterns, communal work practices, seasonal festivities, and place‑based knowledge—capturing its decline across more than a century. Given that the insights found in these literary works are not empirical evidence and describe conditions rooted in a distant historical past, to what extent can they nonetheless help us understand the disruptions that intangible cultural heritage faces today as a result of ongoing forces of change? Since these writers primarily documented intangible cultural heritage under pressures of rural depopulation and urbanisation, which—if any—aspects of their insights are relevant for understanding the threats that climate change poses to intangible cultural heritage today?

FEBRUARY 2026

The Memory Police

A novel by Yōko Ogawa, first published in English in 2019.

On an unnamed island, everyday objects begin to vanish one by one, without warning. The disappearance of each seemingly trivial object—such as hats, ribbons, calendars, perfume and roses—triggers a ritualised erasure: people burn or dispose of remnants, as though compelled by an invisible decree, and quickly forget both the items and their names. The Memory Police—the agents of disappearance—ensure every trace of vanished objects is eliminated, policing both physical presence and collective memory. Yet some characters resist forgetting. They cling to the lost items because of the weight of memory and meaning they carry: a ribbon might recall a birthday celebration, a rose a gesture of love, a calendar the rhythm of seasons and the promise of future plans. For those who remember, these objects are not mere possessions but anchors to identity and intimacy. Preserving them becomes an act of quiet defiance against a system that seeks to erase not only things but also the emotions and stories woven into them. Can cultures—especially non-dominant ones—adjust to cultural change and loss, as all cultures have done through history, now that change and loss are occurring at a comparatively much more accelerated pace? Does the rate of cultural loss outweigh cultural change and regeneration? BONUS TRACK: The Housekeeper and the Professor, by the same author, also reflects on memory. Through the elegance of Euler’s identity—a feat only an exceptionally skilled writer could achieve—Ogawa shows how trust and selfless love can create harmony among lives that seem worlds apart. The novel suggests that ‘things’ with mainly incommensurable value can endure quietly in the background, shaping lives even when—because, in this case, memory falters—they linger only as faint traces.

JANUARY 2026

“A very big fight over a very small language”

An article published in The New Yorker on 1 December 2025.

The article examines the decades-long controversy surrounding efforts to standardise Romansh, one of four Swiss national languages, spoken by fewer than one per cent of the population—some 50,000 people, split among five main dialects. Standardisation involved creating a unified written form called Rumantsch Grischun, which combined elements from the main Romansh dialects. This process included developing a common grammar, a shared orthography, and a harmonised vocabulary, with the ultimate goal of making the language easier to teach, publish, and use officially, thereby helping to preserve Romansh for future generations. However, many Romansh speakers, especially local communities in the canton of Graubünden, as well as teachers, writers, cultural associations, municipalities, and schools resisted standardisation because they felt it threatened their regional identity and cultural heritage, which is closely tied to local dialects. Many saw Rumantsch Grischun as artificial and feared it would erode the authenticity and richness of traditional speech communities. Is this paradox common for other types of intangible cultural heritage? Is opposition more likely to arise when only few people—as is the case for the various Romansh dialects—feel concerned with a certain (variety of an) expression of intangible cultural heritage?

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Daniel Puig - research profile

Profile

Education

Career

Editorial responsibilities

Recent trainings

Memberships

Research stays

Languages

Publications

Peer-reviewed journal articles (in preparation)

Peer-reviewed journal articles (under review)

Peer-reviewed journal articles (in press or published)

Book chapters

Conference proceedings

Peer-reviewed scientific reports (main author or co-author)

Peer-reviewed scientific reports (main editor or co-editor)

Technical and policy reports (only author or co-author)

Institutional strategies (selection)

Teaching

GEO324: Human Geographies of Adaptation to Climate Change

GEO306: Methods in Human Geography

GEO310: Writing and Project Description

GEO283: Geographies of Transformation: Mitigating and Adapting to Rapid Climate Change

Events

National Research Conference on Climate Change Adaptation

Biennial Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies

European Climate Change Adaptation Conference

Adaptation Futures

Infrequently asked questions

APRIL 2026

MARCH 2026

FEBRUARY 2026

JANUARY 2026

Contact

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