Kaera Coetzer-hanack

Biography

"Kaera is a lecturer in the department. Kaera completed her PhD, an applied spatial ecology study, in the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2014. Thereafter, Kaera took a post-doctoral fellow position co-hosted by the Global Change Institute (GCI) and School of Social Sciences: Department of International Relations at Wits. Her current research interests, while securely grounded within ecological theory, draw from other disciplines to achieve better environmental decision-making, recognising that non-ecological factors are fundamental to the successes of conservation outcomes long-term. Her training has emphasised the need for increased inter- and trans- disciplinarity in environmental research and problem-solving, and this is something she prioritises in her work. At present, she focusses on large landscape conservation, geospatial analysis applied with respect to informing management approaches under global change scenarios, environmental governance networks across scales, and better understanding the epistemic communities (or ‘knowledge communities’) across the science-policy-practice interface in Southern African natural resource management and climate change adaptation. She is embedded in the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve Programme (MaB) in South Africa, and assesses the current implementation of the Programme both locally and abroad, focusing on the challenges and opportunities in current and future implementation. Together with research partners, she has begun to work in climate change adaptation across scales, particularly wrt. knowledge co-exploration and co-production for [more] realistic adaptation outcomes. She is a lead author on the Intergovernmental science-policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) programme, with a specific interest in the consequences of climate scenarios for African biodiversity and ecosystem services."

Research Interest

Large landscape conservation, geospatial analysis