Camilla Buenting

Camilla assumes a joint role as a PlanAdapt Fellow and a part-time Programm Manager (Climate Change Adaptation) at PlanAdapt’s Coordination Hub. She shares her time between Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Cape Town, South Africa.

She is a sustainable development practitioner with over 10 years of experience in designing, implementing and monitoring sustainability programmes and projects in sustainable development, such as climate change adaptation, social inclusion and education. Her journey has led her to work with NGOs, multi-lateral agencies, and consulting firms in the areas of research, capacity building, training and project management and monitoring in multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary teams in the Global South.

Before joining PlanAdapt, she worked as a consultant developing GCF and GEF project proposals for multilateral agencies and governments with a strong Ecosystem-based Adaptation component. Examples are the Lake Chilwa TRANSFORM project, in which the local community’s vulnerability has been exacerbated by lowering lake levels year after year as a result of deforestation and climate change, the Antigua and Barbuda Food Security National Adaptation Plan, where potential pathways for enhancing food security in the face of climate change in a small-island state were developed, and cost-benefit analysis of Zimbabwe’s National Adaptation Plan. She has also been involved in corporate sustainability projects in South Africa, inter alia carbon footprinting, water crisis response, sustainability strategy and KPI monitoring for a JSE-listed food company.

While in Brazil, she worked as a project manager developing pilot public policy projects in social inclusion in health and education and environment programmes in Rio de Janeiro with the NGO Viva Rio, such as creating an early-childhood development programme within the City’s existing family healthcare units. Camilla is particularly interested in food systems, sustainable livelihoods, EbA, and M&E. She is enthusiastic about the transdisciplinarity of sustainability studies and passionate about participatory project methodologies.

Camilla holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil as well as a Post-Graduate Diploma and an MPhil in Sustainable Development from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She has been lucky to live in Brazil, Germany, France and South Africa. She is fluent in Portuguese, English, German, French and Spanish.

Camilla contributed to PlanAdapt’s work in the following projects and initiatives:

• What Capacity is Required to Access Finance for Locally-Led and Gender-Responsive Climate Change Adaptation Action at Sub-National Level in Cameroon? – Developing a Framework to Monitor, Evaluate and Learn as an Enabler of Adaptive Project Management
• Supporting Early Career Researchers from the Global South to Enhance Research Impact and Collaborate with Climate Knowledge Brokers
• Adaptation Networks, Partnerships, Alliances and Platforms are Collaborative Approaches to Moving Widespread Knowledge Exchange and Eventually Science-Informed Plans and Strategies Forward
• Helping to Shape the Mindsets of the Next Generation of Women Climate Leaders