Lindsey has a BA (Hons) in Pure and Applied Biology from the University of Oxford, an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College, London, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford, specialising in the long-term ecology of east African Savannas. From 2002-2006, she was Trapnell Fellow in African Terrestrial Ecology at the University of Oxford. Lindsey Gillson joined the Plant Conservation Unit and Botany Department at UCT in April 2006, as a Lecturer in Plant Conservation Biology. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer from 2009, Associate Professor from 2011, and Professor from January 2021. Lindsey’s work covers themes of long-term vegetation change, ecosystem management and conservation, with a particular focus on African ecosystems. She teaches aspects of Conservation , Ecosystem Management, Global Change and Applied Palaeoecology at undergraduate, honours and masters levels. Internationally, she is currently a member of the PAGES (Past Global Changes) Scientific Steering Committee, and the Centre for Australian Biodiversity and Cultural Heritage Centre Advisory Committee. At UCT, she is Deputy Director of the Plant Conservation Unit and is a member of the Science Faculty Animal Ethics Committee and the Environment and Management Working Group. She is Associate Editor of Anthropocene.
Divine Fuh joined the University of Cape Town in 2012 from the University of Basel in Switzerland where he was a senior researcher/lecturer in the Chair for Research and Methodology, Institute for Sociology. Fuh coordinates the Research Group “Fixing the City”, with research interests in youth, masculinities, aspirations, precarity, agency, entrepreneurship, financial inclusion, popular culture and sustainability. His research examines the ways in which people seek ways of ‘smiling’ in the midst of ‘suffering’ focusing on cities, precarity/uncertainty, agency and the quest for stability and human dignity – critically examining aspirations, hope, happiness and becoming. His current publications on youth and upcoming books engage with the basic question of how youth in African cities cope with the many challenges that the weakness of the state, the economy and the many aspects of the on-going processes of globalisation provokes. It explores how urban youth develop new modes of agency that allows them to maintain an active attitude despite the permanent difficulties of finding a place in a society that apparently does not have one for them. FUH is a graduate of the Swiss Postgraduate Programme in Ethnology/Anthropology. He holds a B.Sc. (Honours) in Journalism & Mass Communication, and Political Science from the University of Buea in Cameroon, MA in Development Studies from the University of Botswana, and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Basel in Switzerland. He has taught at the Universities of Basel in Switzerland, Western Cape and Stellenbosch in South Africa, Brasilia in Brazil, and the University of Tokyo in Japan. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin, Germany, and the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has served as a consultant for several international organizations and, has been editorial assistant for several journals, including being founding Managing Editor for Langaa Research and Publishing CIG. He is member of the Future Water Institute, and the Minerals to Metals Initiative at the University of Cape Town.
Louise Gammage is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Cape Town, having completed her PhD under the co-supervision of Profs Astrid Jarre and Charles Mather (Memorial University, NL, Canada) in the SCIFR project. Trained as an environmental geographer, Louise’s current interdisciplinary work focuses on marine social-ecological systems (SESs) and fisheries specifically within the context of South Africa. Her research, taking a systems view, focuses on using integrative and iterative methods to promote understanding of and inform decision-making in marine SESs at various scales of interaction. Particularly, Louise’s research interests include exploring innovative methodologies, such as structured decision-making tools and participatory modelling, to (amongst others) address challenges related to scale and decision-making in complex adaptive systems; understanding drivers of change in SESs with an eye to improving present and future decision-making; and exploring ways for local stakeholders (such as fishers) to build capacity to enhance their well-being while informing governance and policy at the larger decision-making scales through the use of approaches such as scenario planning. She has experience with semi-quantitative modelling techniques (such as cognitive causal mapping and Bayesian network modelling), qualitative and quantitative data, interviews and surveys, group facilitation, scenario planning and fieldwork.
With a professional background in marine systems ecology, I have been specializing on an ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAF) since the late 1980s. My research emphasis has been on exploited marine systems experiencing pronounced environmental signals, and in developing societies. My research interests include the development of ecosystem indicators for fisheries management, systems modelling, modelling with stakeholders and developing inter- and transdisciplinary research methodology. I have senior experience in developing scientific advice for management of human activities in the ocean. Holding the South African Research Chair in Marine Ecology and Fisheries, my current research focuses on developing methodology for structured decision making with regards to human activities in marine social-ecological systems under global change, notably in the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem. Our “Southern Cape Interdisciplinary Fisheries Research” Project is the focus of learning how the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities, can collaborate with each other, and with fishers and their communities on their way to improved sustainability.
Janice McMillan is a Senior Lecturer based in the Curriculum and Course Design team. She joined UCT in 1994, first in the Department of Adult Education, and since 2000, in CHED, based first in HAESDU and now in the new merged unit CILT. Janice's teaching, research and development interests centre on higher education and social responsiveness - with particular emphasis on community-engaged learning, critical citizenship and university-community partnerships more broadly. Since 2010, she has been Convenor of the UCT Global Citizenship: Leading for Social Justice programme. The programme is linked to three of UCT’s six strategic goals and as far as possible, the programme also tries to reflect the four UCT strategic themes: war and peace; improving South African schools; climate change and sustainability; poverty and inequality. Since 2013, she has taught on and convened a credit-bearing version of the GC short courses in the EBE faculty. Increasingly Janice is working with departments and faculties on thinking about how to embed graduate attributes linked to citizenship and social justice into their programmes, in particular through community engaged forms of pedagogy. Janice's work goes beyond UCT and from 1999-2001 she was the UCT academic partner on the national service learning CHESP programme and between 2010 and 2014, she was also the service-learning coordinator for Stanford University's overseas study centre in Cape Town. Janice’s current areas of interest include working with students as educators and faciltators; university-community partnerships; developing a better understanding of social responsiveness in higher education; and working with colleagues on community engaged forms of pedagogy. Within UCT she is a member of the University Social Responsiveness Committee, the Steering Committee for the UCT Knowledge Co-op and the UCT Schools Improvement Initiative. Janice was also on the Board of SHAWCO, a large student volunteer organization from 2006-2015.
Bongani Ncube is a water and agricultural scientist based at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. She has more than 25 years’ experience in mainstream research and non-profit organisations. She started as a government ecologist in 1995, then joined the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) as a Scientific Officer in 2000, a position in which she later obtained her PhD with Wageningen University in 2007. She then joined the secretariat of the Southern and East Africa regional network, WaterNet, where she led the multidisciplinary Limpopo Basin Challenge Program on Water and Food Project 17. She came to South Africa in 2013 where she is pursuing research on water allocation, drought impacts on agriculture, indigenous knowledge, and water resource management. She is also a postgraduate supervisor and lecturer. She is a registered Professional Natural Scientist and a member of the Water Institute of Southern Africa (WISA) and the Soil Science Society of South Africa (SSSSA). She is an international panel reviewer for the National Research Foundation (NRF), the Water Research Commission and a number of international journals. She is an Editorial
Board Member of the WaterSA Journal.
Nelson Odume is the Director of the Unilever Centre for Environmental Water Quality (UCEWQ) within the Institute for Water Research at Rhodes University. He is also the coordinator of the African Water Resources Mobility Network - a multi-partner project funded by the Intra-Africa Academic Mobility Scheme of the European Union. Nelson has successfully led several research and consultancy projects in the field of water resources, particularly in aquatic ecology, freshwater ecosystem health, water quality, pollution studies, biomonitoring, environmental water requirements, integrated water resource management, ethics and water governance. Nelson’s research has earned him outstanding local and international awards and recognitions. Notable among them are the Emerging River Professional Awards by the International River Foundation in Australia, the Bronze Medal Award by the Southern African Society of Aquatic Scientists, the National Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, and being named among 100 Inspiring and Aspiring Young Leaders in Africa by the Young Independents of the Times Media Group. He is often called upon as an expert commentator by the media on water issues e.g. Power FM, TVC-News, Nigeria, Reuter, EL TIEMPO.
Zarina's research addresses the politics and practices of achieving just and sustainable urban transitions. The roles of knowledge and power shaping urban transitions was a key theme of her PhD in Geography, entitled Rethinking Sustainable Development: Power, Policy and Practice in South Durban, University of Cambridge (2002). The distinctive focus of my scholarship is the simultaneous use of transdisciplinary approaches to navigate alternate insights and responses to complex urban issues in southern contexts, whilst foregrounding the diversity of forms of knowledge that are recognised as authoritative within these debates. Her research is marked by its concern to develop southern theorisations on urban transitions, and is framed through a commitment to engaged and socially responsive scholarship. In 2018, she was the recipient of the UCT Faculty of Science Engaged Scholarship Award; in 2019, she was a recipient of the UCT Engaged Scholarship Curriculum Development Grant. International collaborations and research leadership have been developed through the Mistra Urban Futures Programme (2012 - 2019), the Global Futures Council on Cities and Urbanisation (2019), and Pan-African collaborations through the Leading Integrated Research for Agenda 2030, known as LIRA 2030 (current since 2017). She is editor-in-chief of Urban Forum and serve on the editorial boards of Local Environment: the International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, and njp Urban Sustainability. She currently holds a Visiting Fellowship with the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield (2019-2021).
During his studies in environmental sciences, Christian's PhD on uncertainty in LCA, and his postdoc in science studies, he observed that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research was re-invented every time a new project was started. There was no systematic learning and no body of knowledge on how to conceptualize and practice such collaborative research. Since the late 1990s and together with colleagues from around the world, he is trying to build up such a body of knowledge, as for instance by the Principles for Designing Transdisciplinary Research, the Handbook of Transdisciplinary Research or td-net’s toolbox for co-producing knowledge. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research are means to an end. In the context of his department, this end is sustainable development. Sustainable development requires tackling complex and societally contested issues. He is committed to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research because he considers both the key means to do so.
Laura’s research is at the nexus of sustainability, science and society. She has a background in Human Geography, with research interests in development studies, political ecology and STS. In her PhD, she investigated the inter- and transdisciplinary cooperation in an international research project on sustainable resource management in Southern Africa. The focus was on the analysis of existing power and interest constellations of the involved actors and institutions and their influence on the transdisciplinary approach. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), investigating institutional and socio-cultural factors that promote the co-production of climate services in cities.
Sheona Shackleton joined the ACDI as Deputy Director in January 2018. She also holds an Honorary Professorship with the Department of Environmental Science at Rhodes University. Sheona has worked at the interface between rural development, livelihoods and natural resource use and management for the past 35 years. Her research and postgraduate supervision has covered a diversity of areas within this broad theme such as community conservation, rural livelihoods and vulnerability, ecosystem services and human well-being, forest product use and commercialisation, natural resource governance and climate change adaptation. Her current research focusses on livelihood and landscape (social-ecological) change, with a particular interest in climate change as a driver and how it interacts with other shocks and stressors to influence adaptation, transformation and future livelihood trajectories. Sheona has been engaged in interdisciplinary, participatory and transdisciplinary research for most of her career after being part of the startup team for a University of the Witwatersrand interdisciplinary unit in the late 1980s (Wits Rural Facility). Her interest in engaged scholarship and knowledge co-production arises from both a practical research and ethical perspective (where she has experiences of social learning approaches to knowledge co-production), but also an academic one in terms of how best to integrate knowledge co-production processes into our teaching and learning and to support such an approach in our postgraduate research. Sheona and her project team were awarded the VC’s Distinguished Community Engagement Award for their social leaning work on climate change, HIV/AIDs and vulnerability in 2015. Sheona is on the board of the journals World Development and Land, is a member of ASSAF and has reviewed proposals for a wide range of organisations including NRF, VW Foundation, DFID, Belmont Foundation, SPACES and others. She has served on several national government and non-government committees in areas related to her expertise. She has experience coordinating large projects and a well-established network of international partners and collaborators. She has published her work extensively both in academic books and journals, but also the more popular media, and has reviewed papers for some 30 different journal titles.
Dr Nadia Sitas is a sustainability scientist working within the science-policy interface on issues related to social-ecological resilience with a specific focus on equity and gender. Her research interests span both the social and ecological spheres and much of her experience comes from engaging in research and practice in the global south. Nadia has experience in leading and working in large transdisciplinary teams and is committed to research that can have transformative impact. For over a decade Nadia has been involved in applied research where she has focussed on understanding knowledge exchange processes linked to mainstreaming the environment into various decision-making contexts. These mainstreaming activities have focused mainly on co-designing stakeholder engagement and social learning processes and developing user-inspired decision support tools related to ecosystem services, social-ecological resilience and development planning.
Stuart Taberner was educated at the University of Cambridge (BA and PhD) and the University of Chicago (MA). He worked at the University of Bristol from 1996-2000, before joining the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures in Leeds in August 2000. Since arriving in Leeds, he has also completed an MA in Modern Jewish Studies. Professor Taberner was promoted to Professor of German in 2005. He has been Head of Department, Director of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute and Head of the Graduate School of the Faculty of Arts, amongst other school and faculty responsibilities. He has also served on the A Level Curriculum Advisory Board for Modern Languages, the Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Studies Board and on the Institute of Modern Languages’ Languages Advisory Committee, as well as other national roles relating to modern languages and arts and humanities teaching and research. Professor Taberner was Director for International and Interdisciplinary Research at UK Research and Innovation from 2016-2018, leading on the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). He is currently Dean for Interdisciplinary Research at Leeds, where he works across all faculties to promote and shape interdisciplinary and collaborative research to address global challenges, including climate change, resilience, sustainable growth and employment, sustainable food production and clean water, urbanisation, energy, migration and forced displacement.
Anna is a geographer / environmental scientist specializing in urban climate adaptation, with a particular interest in transformative ways of governing water-related risks and vulnerabilities associated with climate change and urbanization. She engages in transdisciplinary research on climate resilient, sustainable urbanism, public decision making and multi-level governance. The research directions she is actively pursuing are: (1) understanding the institutional and organizational requirements for climate resilient urban (ground)water governance; and (2) developing a transdisciplinary methodology for climate-sensitive decision analysis. Anna has 15 years of experience working on research and consulting projects of various shapes and sizes, all related in some way to climate risks and adaptation. Anna’s PhD and post-doctoral work focused on climate adaptation in urban contexts, notably in Cape Town, Windhoek, Durban, Harare and Lusaka through the Mistra Urban Futures, CLIMWAYS, FRACTAL, LIRA 2030 and GreenGov projects. She completed her PhD entitled ‘Urban climate adaptation as a process of organisational decision making’ in 2017, investigating three cases of urban climate adaptation in the City of Cape Town. Prior to joining ACDI, Anna worked with the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG) and the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at UCT. She continues to work on collaborative projects with CSAG and ACC colleagues. Before joining UCT, Anna worked for the Stockholm Environment Institute, at their office in Oxford, UK.
Jessica is a Namibian ecologist with a background in human geography, holding a CR4D and African Women in Climate Change fellowship at ACDI. She is also a research associate at the University of York, University of Nairobi, and African Conservation Centre. She uses probabilistic social-ecological modelling and scenario analysis to measure impacts of development on land use change. Currently, Jessica is working on an ESRC-funded collaborative capacity building project, using participatory scenario planning to measure potential impacts of Chinese foreign direct investment in transportation corridors in East Africa. She is also leading an IDRC-funded project predicting the synergies and trade-offs of ecological infrastructure in peri-urban areas. Most recently, she assessed the potential impact of climatic and demographic change on local actor decisions and land use in mountain social-ecological systems, and biodiversity and ecosystem services in smallholder agricultural landscapes. Jessica completed her BSocSci(Hons) at UCT, MSc and DPhil at Oxford, and postdoctoral studies at Colorado State University and ETH Zurich. Jessica has been involved in various NSF, NERC, NRF, DFID, CGAIR, IDRC, ESRC, and USAID funded projects, conducting field research in Nepal, India, Vietnam, Tanzania, Namibia, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Switzerland and Peru. Her professional activities have been affiliated with the UN (e.g., Environment Programme and International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction), governments (e.g., South Africa, Ghana), NGOs (e.g., Conservation International, WWF), working closely with local stakeholders across sectors and scales to generate new information. Jessica has similarly conducted research for the Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security, Centre for International Forestry Research, Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, Cambridge, Oxford, London School of Economics, and Brown University. Jessica sits on advisory boards for five CBOs, is an elected member of the Global Environmental Facility, has advocated for ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction and UNFCCC COP, and is a contributing author to The Economic of Ecosystems and Biodiversity reports. She has taught on international courses in Global Biodiversity Trade and Indigenous Communities, Field Ecology, Wildland Ecosystems, Urban Geography, Global Challenges for the 21st Century, and Cities of the South and is currently supervising one PhD student and three MSc students.
John holds post-graduate degrees in philosophy, theology and sociology and is currently working towards his PhD with a specific focus on developing context-relevant transdisciplinary research approaches for conducting solution-oriented research in a developing world context. His expertise is in transdisciplinary methodologies and methods for tackling complex social-ecological systems challenges. For the last ten years he has been actively involved in building and managing the TsamaHub an inter-faculty research centre at Stellenbosch University, which offers a transdisciplinary doctoral programme in sustainable development. John has been instrumental in raising international funding for conducting transdisciplinary doctoral programmes on food security and climate change on the African continent, known as the TRECCAfrica and ACCAI programmes.
Ulli Vilsmaier has been researching and teaching inter- and transdisciplinary research from 2011-2020 at Leuphana University. She is specialized in designing, accompanying, and implementing boundary-crossing research, develops methods for interface design and boundary work and has large experiences with reserach development worldwide. She has been supervising PhD and Master thesis of social and cultural scientisists, artist and designers in Sustainability Science, Geography, Education and the Humanities.
Coleen Vogel is a climatologist by training and has undertaken research in climate change, climate vulnerability and adaptation, with a particular focus on disaster risk reduction and climate variability. She was one of the key contributors to the writing of the Green and White Papers on South African Disaster Management and was a major contributing author for the Disaster Management Act. She was one of the Chapter Lead Authors of the Africa Chapter for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC 4th Assessment Report and was also an author of the Synthesis Report for Policy Makers of the 4th IPCC Assessment Report. This large team of various scientists, together with Al Gore, received a Nobel Peace Prize. Coleen was a Chapter Author on Human Security for the 5th IPCC assessment report. Coleen has also been involved in various international global environmental change activities. She has been Chair and Vice Chair of international committees (for example, the International Human Dimensions Programme, now known together with other international programmes as Future Earth). She has received an international award, the Burtoni Award, for her work on climate change advocacy and science of climate change adaptation. Her current research interests include transformative education for global environment change and sustainability, climate change in its broader context and adaptation and disaster risk reduction focusing particularly on the interactions between physical and social dimensions shaping change. She is very keen to build links and collaborations with others, particularly in sustainability and transdisciplinarity science. Coleen is currently project lead on the City of Johannesburg Adaptation and climate change. Passionate about youth development she is very involved in mentoring students (both undergraduate and post graduate) helping to advance both theory and praxis in various practical research projects with value-add impacts. In addition to being an adaptation specialist, Coleen is also undertaking research into transdisciplinary research approaches in various African contexts.
Carol Wright is Manager of Research in the Policy and Strategy Department, Corporate Services Directorate, City of Cape Town (CCT), South Africa. She is responsible for leading and implementing the City’s Research Framework and agenda and associated research programmes, research management and related processes. Her areas of responsibility include organisational research and research analytics, with a focus on Cape Town, as well as the management of the CCT Sustainable Development Goals approach and implementation plan. She has worked in Local Government in South Africa for over 30 years in an urban and city development context, in particular in the development information, data and research fields. Her work has focused on a City-wide and local area level; robust cross-Department, transversal management teams, in internal and external contexts, with a range of stakeholders, including partners and service providers, at a local, national and international level. Work at a strategic, analytical level involves the provision of data (socio-economic, development), interpretative information and trends to strategies and policies as well as projects (e.g. the City Development Strategy and the integrated Development Plans); indicator and monitoring, evaluation and reporting framework management to inform and support policy implementation.