- Understanding social equity and sustainability interactions in the Sustainable Development Goals: gender differences in food security
- Dialogue for decision-making: unpacking the ‘City Learning Lab’ approach
- Understanding the socio-institutional context to support adaptation for future water security in forest landscapes
- Agent-based modelling: A tool for addressing the complexity of environment and development policy issues
- The SEI Initiative on Climate Services
Mònica Coll Besa joined SEI Oxford in 2012 as a Research Fellow. From April 2017 she works with SEI as an SEI Affiliated Researcher from Barcelona, Spain. She works on the social aspects of climate adaptation, particularly working at the science-policy-practice interface addressing complex environmental issues, mainly in developing countries.
Mònica’s experience includes the use of climate information for decision-making including the development and application of decision support tools and processes, capacity building and communication for adaptation planning, analysis of socio-ecological processes (e.g. including ecosystem-based and community-based adaptation), social learning and stakeholder engagement. She is also experienced in participatory processes and fieldwork, and she is particularly well suited to link research with implementation of actions on-the-ground. Mònica is the weADAPT theme editor of the Ecosystem-based adaptation theme and the Synergies between Adaptation and Mitigation theme and also provides strategic support to the development of weADAPT.org, including partnerships and collaborations within the members of the platform as well as knowledge management support.
Key research areas of interest include:
- Climate services for adaptation planning (water, energy, food security and DRR)
- Synergies between adaptation and mitigation (e.g. climate-smart agriculture)
- Participatory vulnerability assessments and local livelihoods, including gender
- Social learning, transformative governance & stakeholder engagement
- Socio-ecological system dynamics including linkages between community-based and ecosystem-based adaptation
- Creative communication for social change, ICTs, and knowledge brokering
- Cities and climate change (i.e. urban agriculture and food security, green spaces, smart transportation systems, water-energy nexus)
- Nutrition security, organic food movement, health and well-being
Lately, Mònica has been strongly involved in FRACTAL and the SEI Climate Services Initiative, supporting the decision-making work in Southern African cities, capacity building, and social learning processes around co-production of knowledge and collaboration processes with different types of stakeholders. In PLACARD, her main involvement is in enhancing dialogue across the Disaster Risk Reduction and climate adaptation communities. And in IMPRESSIONS, she has conducted work around high end climate change scenarios and transnational climate impacts.
Prior to SEI, she was the Project Field Coordinator at CARE International in Tanzania for the Mitigation of Climate Change in Agriculture (MICCA) pilot project that promoted climate-smart agriculture in smallholder farmer systems in the South Uluguru Mountains, Tanzania.
She has a degree on Environmental Sciences from the University of Barcelona (Spain), and a joint MSc Degree in Environmental sciences, Policy and Management (Hons) from Central European University (Hungary), the University of the Aegean (Greece), the International Institute for Industrial Environmental economics from Lund University (Sweden), and the University of Manchester (UK). She did her MSc dissertation with UNEP Risø Centre on Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development (URC, Denmark), and her research focused on the impacts of climate variability and climate change on women’s livelihoods. In her research, she assessed women’s local perceptions of the vulnerability context and coping/adaptive strategies based on a case study in coastal Tanzania.