Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellow Announced

28 Jul 2014
28 Jul 2014

Three new Research Chairs and one Senior Research Fellow were seconded to the ACDI for a three-year tenure at the start of this year. These positions have a strategic role: each of them will offer leadership and boost research production through activities focused on the themes they lead.

 

 Professor Ralph Hamann at the UCT Graduate School of Business, one of the three new Research Chairs, leads a team of researchers looking at why and how organisations contribute to transformations to sustainability. His students and post-doc have been investigating the embedding of sustainability  culture in large corporations, organisational sensemaking of their social-ecological context, and cross-sector collaboration.

 



 Associate Professor Martine Visser, who takes up the second Research Chair, focused on behavioural economic applications to climate change, natural resource use, health and poverty alleviation, is studying how social norms and preferences such as trust, co-operation and risk aversion impact on decision  making.

 




 The third Research Chair will be held by Dr Res Altweg, who will be looking at understanding the impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services (using birds as indicators) and quantifying weather changes in Southern Africa and their attribution to climate change, with detailed analysis of  weather trends.

 


 



 Dr Britta Rennkamp, who joins ACDI as a Senior Research Fellow, will be addressing trade-offs between climate-change mitigation and poverty alleviation – how can governments reduce emissions over the long term without jeopardising their countries’ achievements in socio-economic development?