Lecturer in Sustainable Development
Dr Jessica Thorn is a lecturer in sustainable development at the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews. She is also an ARISE (African Research Initiative for Scientific Excellence) fellow at the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Namibia. Her work broadly concentrates on climate change adaptation, green infrastructure, and social-ecological system transitions in peri urban, smallholder and mountain systems. Her research spans individual households to national comparative surveys to global systematic reviews, involving the assessment of biodiversity and ecosystem services, participatory scenario planning, and probabilistic land use change modelling – addressing a variety of environmental challenges including mega linear infrastructure, mining, marine and coastal ecosystem-based adaptation, climate migration, and informal settlement flood and drought risk. Hailing from Namibia, she has 17 years of experience working on various ESRC, IDRC, GCRF, CR4D, NSF, NERC, NRF, DFID, CGAIR, IDRC, ESRC, UNEP, UNDP, and USAID funded projects, travelling to over 60 countries. She has secured >£1.6 million of research funding involving multi-institutional international and interdisciplinary collaborations.
Jessica’s research has impacted the policy sphere - affiliated to the UN, World Bank, governments, NGOs, working closely with local stakeholders across sectors. She is a coordinating lead author for the Global Environmental Outlook 6 Business Brief on Future Proofing infrastructure, and a contributing author to the IPCC AR6 WGII Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Africa and Mountain chapters, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report Agri-Food Systems Report shaping the African Union’s and SADC secretariat’s Climate Change Strategy. As an effective communicator, she engages a range of media and outreach including newspaper, animation, blog, podcast, YouTube, webiners, MOOCs, databases, policy briefs and dialogues.
She has taught on several university courses at the University of St Andrews, University of Oxford, University of York, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Sokoine University of Agriculture, University of Cape Town, University of Nairobi, and Colorado State University. For this work she has received over 33 awards, fellowships, and grants, including the League of European Research Universities leadership award, Brettschneider (Cornell), Mind the Environmental Gap (Oxford), and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Seal of Excellence (European Commission). Prior to coming to St Andrews, she completed her BSocSci(Hons) at the University of Cape Town, MSc and DPhil at Oxford, postdoctoral studies at Colorado State University and ETH Zurich (Mountain Sentinels Collaborative Network) and University of York (Development Corridors Partnership and held an African Women in Climate Change fellowship at the African Climate and Development Initiative.
Joined 2011
Organisation
Work
University of St Andrews
