Gina Ziervogel
Expertise: Climate change vulnerability and adaptation; urban governance; Southern African development; participatory research
Professor Gina Ziervogel is Director of the African Climate and Development Initiative and Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a geographer by training, with 25 years of experience in the field of adaptation and vulnerability to global environmental change, where she has worked closely with a range of actors across scales from the neighbourhood and NGO level to cities, provinces and national level to better understand opportunities to adapt to climate risk given governance and inequality challenges.
Gina completed her PhD in Geography at the University of Oxford in 2002 after obtaining a BSc at the University of Cape Town and her Honours in Environmental Water Management at Rhodes University. She is a B2-rated researcher by SA’s National Research Foundation.
Methodologically, she is interested in engaged scholarship and transdisciplinary projects that bring together civil society, government and academics to address problems collaboratively. She was a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment report, Cities, settlements and key infrastructure chapter and has authored numerous papers, book chapters and popular articles. She co-wrote a book about the Cape Town drought with science journalist Leonie Joubert, has collaborated with a film-maker on a documentary about community water stories and published a climate justice comic aimed at high school students. In 2020 Gina was awarded the UCT Social Responsiveness Award. In 2020/2021 she was a Fulbright scholar, based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As part of the Homeward Bound programme HB6, an international leadership programme for women in STEMM, she travelled with 100 women to Antarctica in 2023.