Anna Taylor

ACDI Research Fellow Expertise: climate adaptation, urban governance, African cities, vulnerability assessment, adaptive management, transdisciplinarity, embedded research, case study research, organizational ethnography 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. She engages in transdisciplinary research on climate resilient, sustainable urbanism, public decision making and multi-level governance. Anna has 15 years’ experience working on research and consulting projects related to climate risks and adaptation. Anna’s PhD and post-doctoral work focused on climate adaptation in southern African urban contexts (notably in Cape Town, Windhoek, Durban, Harare and Lusaka), contributing to the Mistra Urban Futures, CLIMWAYS, FRACTAL, LIRA 2030 and GreenGov projects. Recent consulting projects have included developing a Climate Risk and Vulnerability Framework for the South African national government (Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries), and learning from case studies of using scientific climate information in decision-making of South African metropolitan municipalities (commissioned by the Cities Support Programme in the National Treasury). Anna 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 from the position of an embedded researcher within the city government. Subsequently she coordinated the work of seven embedded researchers across six southern African cities within the FRACTAL project. Since joining UCT in 2011, Anna works with the African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI), the Climate System Analysis Group (CSAG) and the African Centre for Cities (ACC). Between 2006 and 2010, Anna worked for the Stockholm Environment Institute, based in Oxford, UK. She continued working with SEI part-time until 2019. Anna has developed Masters course modules on climate change in cities, and supervises postgraduate students working on questions of urban adaptation, adaptive capacity, climate governance and the use of climate information in decision-making.