Katharine Vincent

Trained as a geographer, I have over a decade of technical experience in the fields of vulnerability, adaptation and disaster risk reduction (and gender-sensitive approaches to those 3 fields). I am active in the academic community, and am a visiting Associate Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where I supervise postgraduate students. I act as a lead author on the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Second Working Group's 9th chapter (on rural areas), and a contributing author to the 22nd chapter on Africa. As a director of Kulima Integrated Development Solutions, I spend the majority of my time working as a consultant (to UNDP, UNEP, FAO, DFID, USAID and various NGOs), mainly in southern and eastern Africa, where I have firsthand experience of the policy and institutional frameworks around climate change, disaster risk reduction, and food security. Much of my work involves communication, “translating” knowledge typically from the scientific community in a language and format that is appropriate for the end user community (whether that is practitioners, policy-makers, or local communities), which is typically embedded in a process of stakeholder engagement, facilitation, and knowledge management.