Senior Associate

Stockholm Environment Institute and UK Climate Impacts Program, Oxford University, UK

Biography:
The 2012 VCCCAR Visiting Fellow was Dr Kate Lonsdale. The underlying theme of Kate's three month fellowship (October - December 2012) was how to build effective research collaborations for adaptation, particularly what it means to be developing a learning approach. In addition to giving a range of seminars and contributing to number of meetings and workshop, the focus of Kate's visit was to assist with the initial stages of the Implementing Adaptation project with colleagues from RMIT University. This included developing a research approach, exploring what it means to develop a learning research team as well as undertaking interviews.

The report from Kate's fellowship is available from the VCCCAR publications page: http://www.vcccar.org.au/publications.

Kate has worked on adaptation as a researcher, trainer, facilitator, consultant, mentor, evaluator and in an advisory capacity for the last 16 years in both developed and developing country contexts. She has a particular interest in adaptation in practice and what supports organisations to be well adapting. This includes work at the UN level (for UNEP and UNDP), the EU level (managing multidisciplinary projects), the national level (e.g. in the UK through her work at Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, UK Climate Impacts Programme and DFID), the provincial level (with UK regional climate change partnerships) as well as at a sectoral level (assessing sectoral adaptive capacity for the UK's first Climate Change Risk Assessment) and as a member of advisory bodies (e.g. the Joseph Rowntree Foundation Climate Change and Social Justice Programme and the UK's Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership). Since 2008 Kate has been working with the UK Climate Impacts Programme.  Prior to that (and again since January 2012), Kate has been working with the Stockholm Environment Institute.