Gavin Kenny

I am a climate resilient expert with more than 30 years professional experience. Together with my partner I am also a small farmer in the Coromandel region of New Zealand.

I studied at Massey and Lincoln Universities in New Zealand where I gained degrees in Horticultural Science and a PhD in Agricultural Meteorology. My professional work on climate change began in the UK in 1991 managing a two-year Europe-wide research project on the impacts of climate change on European agriculture. I was with Prof Martin Parry's team, initially based at University of Birmingham and subsequently a founding staff member at the Environmental Change Unit at Oxford University. For the remainder of the 1990s I was with the International Global Change Institute (IGCI) at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. While there I worked on climate change impact, vulnerability and adaptation projects in New Zealand (the CLIMPACTS programme), Bangladesh and the Pacific Islands and a development project in northern Viet Nam. The Pacific Islands work in particular had a strong focus on capacity building and technical support.

I have worked independently since 2001, initially focused on pioneering adaptation work with New Zealand farmers and growers, and for the last decade principally focused on international work. The latter has involved contracts with various agencies including: UNDP, IFAD, ADB, World Bank, SPC and the Government of Samoa. While principally focused in the Pacific Islands, I have had contracts as far afield as Mauritius, Iran and China.

Over the past thirty years I have gained extensive experience as a climate change adaptation and climate resilience expert, including with: project development, management and evaluation; integration of climate change and climate resilience into project formulation; multi-disciplinary research; multi-stakeholder engagement; capacity building involving workshop facilitation and participatory approaches; grassroots engagement; technical support; climate change communication and bridging between science, policy and practical action; production of a wide range of project outputs, covering documents for policy, technical and non-technical audiences.

Joined 2010

Organisation