Kate Lonsdale

Kate Lonsdale is an SEI Affiliated Researcher with SEI Oxford. Building on a diverse career engaging charities, businesses and the public sector on issues of climate change, participation, change management and social justice, Kate’s work as a freelance facilitator and consultant, associated with SEI Oxford, focuses on understanding adaptation in practice.

Key questions that Kate looks at include: what it means to be well adapting; how you build adaptive capacity; and what supports and constrains the processes. She has an interest in developing novel ways to communicate adaptation experience, for example through storytelling and participatory video.

At the UK Climate Impacts Programme from 2008-11, she worked with many organisations to support adaptation to a changing climate. For the previous 14 years she was a research associate, trainer and consultant, first with the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University and later with the Stockholm Environment Institute. During this time she worked on many aspects of adaptation. For the ADAM project on organisational adaptation in the EU context, she investigated how organisations access information about climate change and what supports the translation of awareness into adaptation on the ground. She was lead author on the United Nations Development Programme’s Adaptation Policy Framework technical paper on Stakeholder Engagement in the Adaptation Process, and managed a 2-year project investigating the social implications of catastrophic sea-level rise in the Thames Estuary. She undertook a project gathering stakeholder opinion on the landscape of South Oxfordshire in 2080 for the Northmoor Trust’s Landscape Evolution Centre, and has run training for the Red Cross in Sri Lanka on participatory vulnerability and capacity assessments.

Kate has been an active member of the Local Agenda 21 team of Oxford City Council, through which she was trained in the facilitation and design of inclusive meetings and events. She has recently completed a post-graduate diploma in ’Change Agent Skills and Strategies’ at Surrey University. She is a trustee of COIN, the Climate Outreach information Network, chairing the organisation during 2011. She has an MSc in Environmental Management and Pollution Control, and previous jobs have included working as a scientific adviser for a group of environmental lawyers in Bangladesh, setting up an environmental resource centre, running a summer programme in Budapest on Environment and Policy for mid-term professionals from Eastern and Central Europe. For her PhD research, funded by Yorkshire Water and the Water Research Centre, she investigated the best way to minimise ‘gross solid’ pollution from the sewers of Sheffield.