Anna Taylor

Expertise: Climate Adaptation in Cities

Dr Anna Taylor is in an ACDI researcher deepening our understanding of public decision-making to enhance climate adaptation and urban sustainability. Trained in environmental science and urban geography, her work centres on questions of what, how, when and why decisions are made to adapt (or not) to climate risks, especially related to droughts and floods in cities, through a climate-resilient development pathways lens (with a strong interest in non-linear notions of time and groundwater stewardship). Anna mainly uses qualitative approaches, case study methodologies and participatory methods to co-produce new knowledge and practices of adaptive governance, promoting transdisciplinarity. She has experience designing and running Learning Labs, as well as undertaking and coordinating embedded research, and working with municipal governments on climate risks and adaptation planning. Anna teaches on two UCT Masters programmes – the Masters in Climate Change and Development and the Masters in Sustainable Urban Practice – and supervises postgraduate students researching urban climate change issues.

She has 18 years of experience working on, co-leading and managing climate adaptation research projects internationally. Anna has been supporting South Africa’s Presidential Climate Commission to operationalise a Climate Resilient Development Pathways (CRDPs) approach for realising South Africa’s Just Transition. This has included developing CRDPs guidance, as well as facilitating peer-to-peer learning to build climate resilience to droughts and floods, seeding an active community of practice offering mutual learning for planning and implementing climate-resilient development at the provincial and municipal scales. Anna is collaborating with colleagues at the University of Cardiff to explore factors shaping the response of households to the threat of water shocks in four major cities – Cape Town, Dodoma, Lagos and Windhoek – and how their actions affect the wider resilience of the places where they live and surrounding communities, focussing on the role of groundwater in promoting the resilience of cities and urban communities (Water Stressed Cities project). This builds on the GoFlow project that Anna led, funded by the Water Research Commission, facilitating multi-stakeholder Learning Labs in Cape Town and Nelson Mandela Bay on urban water metabolism and groundwater governance.

Anna completed her PhD entitled ‘Urban Climate Adaptation as a Process of Organisational Decision Making’ in 2017 at UCT, based on working as an embedded researcher in the Cape Town city government as part of the Swedish-funded Mistra Urban Futures (M-UF) programme. Anna then went on to coordinate a team of seven embedded researchers working between the local university and city government in six cities across southern Africa – Windhoek, Lusaka, Maputo, Harare, Durban and Cape Town – as part of the Future Resilience of African Cities and Lands (FRACTAL) project, funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Prior to UCT, Anna worked for the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), based at the SEI Oxford centre in the UK, supporting applied research and capacity strengthening on multi-stressor vulnerability assessment, risk communication and adaptation planning, mainly through UN, EU and UK government-funded programmes. Her work at SEI Oxford also involved projects with large NGOs, notably WWF-UK and Oxfam, supporting the mainstreaming of climate adaptation in their work, as well as establishing the weADAPT platform. Prior to that, Anna worked as a research assistant in Cape Town and as a project coordinator in Ghana, after completing her Bachelor of Science Honours Degree in Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town in 2004.