Meet the team

Christopher Trisos 

Principal Investigator

Christopher Trisos directs the Climate Risk Lab at the African Climate and Development Initiative. The lab integrates data and methods from environmental and social sciences to help inform rapid, just and equitable responses to the climate crisis. Current research questions include climate change risks to biodiversity and whether ecological disruption from climate change will be gradual or abrupt, climate change risks to the biodiversity of wild-harvested food plants, how climate change impacts the prevalence of infectious disease, whether solar geoengineering increases climate change risks, and how to manage risk across interconnected social and environmental systems.

Dr. Trisos is a coordinating lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 6th Assessment Report, responsible for Chapter 9 of Working Group II, African Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. He has also consulted on climate change adaptation for the World Bank. Dr Trisos spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at University of Maryland, where his research focused on biodiversity and climate change. He earned a doctorate in Zoology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His research is funded by a Future Leader–African Independent Research (FLAIR) Fellowship from the Royal Society and the African Academy of Sciences.

Nick Simpson

Postdoc Researcher

Nick Simpson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the lab and the Chapter Scientist for Chapter 9 Africa Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability of the 6th Assessment of the IPCC. Nick’s current research concentrates on the complexity of climate risk, how everyday African’s perceive climate change, energy poverty/access, and security practices at the interface of climate change and conflict.

Nick’s previous research has extended security studies to the governance of new Anthropocene risks / harms, such as the Cape Town drought. Nick was also the first to establish theoretical and practice ready consilience between the capabilities approach and environmental assessment. His PhD concentrated on participatory sustainable decision-making. Nick’s research aims to support the creation and improvement of livelihoods and small businesses for those at the highest environmental and economic risk. His work with Tearfund (UK) has identified design principles that inform the conceptualization and evaluation of projects to aid in the replication of emerging sustainability-orientated work for humanitarian NGOs. Their latest collaboration concentrates on off-grid low carbon energy and credit solutions in Africa for informal and marginalized communities.

Joanne Bentley

Postdoc Researcher

Dr Bentley’s research project concentrates on improving our ability to anticipate climate change risks to biodiversity, and use this knowledge to design better biodiversity conservation strategies. Dr Bentley received her PhD from University of Cape Town for research focused on the differences in compounds produced by a desiccation-tolerant plant across an environmental gradient and the use of green chemistry as an alternative to conventional toxic solvents. Her previous postdoc work profiled the metabolomes of two plant species with different desiccation-tolerance strategies. She was awarded the South African Association of Botanists medal for best PhD in 2019.

Andreas Meyer

Postdoc Researcher

Andreas Meyer is a biologist broadly interested in macroecology, macroevolution, and primate conservation. His research focuses on several aspects of these topics, including patterns of biodiversity, diversification rates, niche evolution, and species responses to global change. His current research project aims to assess the extent to which African biodiversity is at risk from climate change and provide appropriate guidance for the development of mitigation strategies. Andreas has a PhD in Zoology from Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil, with a stay at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, USA. Andreas is also part of the project Global Patterns of Primate Conservation, which brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines to examine the drivers of primate population decline, model future scenarios for primate conservation, and present solutions to protect primate species.

Kelvin Mulungu

Postdoc Researcher

Kelvin Mulungu holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics fromColorado State University. He was a sustainability leadership fellow at the School of Global Environmental Sustainability during the 2019-2020 academic year and a PhD student research fellow at the Africa Rice Center in 2019. He obtained a Collaborative MSc in Agricultural and Applied Economics from Egerton University in Kenya and University of Pretoria in South Africa. He worked for a CGIAR project in Zambia as Research Manager for an agriculture for nutrition and health project in Zambia. He also worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Zambia Institute of Economic and Social Research. His research interests include nutrition, gender in agriculture, climate change, and natural resource economics. For his PhD dissertation, he studied the effectiveness of forests as natural insurance for nutrition, how weather shocks affect risk attitudes of smallholder farmers and hence their investment decisions, and provided an alternative explanation for the ‘hungry farmer paradox’.

Luckson Zvobgo

PhD researcher

Luckson is a PhD student in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences at University of Cape Town. His research is on adaptation to climate variability using local and indigenous knowledge practices for smallholder farmers under rain-fed agriculture in semi-arid regions. He is also interested in water resources governance and development, and actively participated in the development of Zimbabwe Water Policy. Luckson is a co-chapter scientist for the IPCC 6th Assessment Report and is a consultant in the fields of environmental management and water resources development with huge capital projects completed in Zimbabwe and Namibia..

Carina Wessels

MSc Researcher

Carina enjoyed her career as a professional photographer for nearly 10 years before she decided she wanted to achieve even more in life. Carina is an MSc student in climate change and development. Her research focuses on climate change risks to wild plant species that are harvested for food and that can provide essential nutrition to rural communities when staple crops fail due to drought. Carina graduated from Stellenbosch University with a BSc Hons Biodiversity and Ecology degree.

Birgitt Ouweneel

MSc Researcher

Birgitt is an MSc student in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences and the Future Water Institute at UCT. Her current research project focuses on water resource and demand management, specifically in the context of the Cape Town Water Crisis. She is also very interested in the socio-economic consequences of climate change as well as climate change risks to biodiversity and the natural environment. Birgitt  is a research assistant at ACDI working on various projects concentrating on  climate change risks (coastal erosion and sea level rise) to heritage sites and global risk of livestock heat stress under climate change. She is also a research assistant for infographics and GIS data processing for the Africa Chapter of the IPCC.

Luleka Dlamini

PhD Researcher

Luleka Dlamini is working on climate change risks to cash crops and other regionally important crops such as cassava as part of the Africa chapter of the IPCC 6th Assessment Report. Luleka holds an MSc. in Environmental and Geographical Science, specializing in Atmospheric Science from University of Cape Town. She is doing a joint PhD between UCT and the Soil Physics and Land Management group at Wageningen University & Research (Netherlands). Luleka is broadly interested in transdisciplinary research that focuses on agriculture, water, climate change, crop modelling and use of earth observation in the African context. Her PhD research will focus on integrating earth observation and crop modelling to explore future climate-smart agriculture in data-limited areas of South Africa.

Portia Adade Williams

Research Associate

Portia is a Research Scientist with the Science and Technology Policy Research Institute (STEPRI) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Ghana. Portia holds a MSc. Industrial Economics & Management from the Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden) and BSc. (Hons) Agricultural Science from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana.  She holds a PhD from the University of Cape Town. Her research is on feasibility and effectiveness of climate change adaptation strategies across Africa, with a focus on agricultural systems. Portia is a contributing author to the Africa chapter of IPCC 6th Assessment Report where she is leading a research synthesis of climate change adaptation actions across Africa.

Danielle Millar

Research Associate

Danielle Millar is working on climate change risks to health and climate adaptation in the health sector across Africa as part of the Africa chapter of the IPCC 6th Assessment Report. Danielle holds a Masters in Medical Physiology from the University of Stellenbosch. Her research focuses on cellular and molecular biology, specifically disease prevention and intervention. She has experience in autophagic modulation, cancer biology, adjunctive therapies (including indigenous medicines and dietary interventions), herb-drug interactions, and drug metabolism and transporters. She has an interest in environmental health and stress biology. Her most recent research has focused on the effects of air quality on human health, particularly in air pollution hotspots in South Africa.