Anna Walnycki

Team lead – climate action for equitable cities

Anna leads IIED’s work on the intersecting challenges of informal urbanisation, climate change and socio-economic inequality. Her work focuses on:

  • Closing knowledge and capacity gaps at the community and city level: supporting better data collection on the impacts of climate change for decision makers. Documenting the socio economic and climate benefits of low carbon upgrading to city, national and global actors to encourage replication and scaling across cities.
  • Inclusive governance models: convening a broad range of partners to experiment with alterative governance arrangements focused on transformative change through initiatives such as urban labs.
  • Building the finance case: synthesising evidence of the value and opportunity of climate- action that also supports inclusive upgrading of informal settlements. 

Anna is also the IIED lead for the IKI-funded Transformative Urban Coalitions programme (with DIE, UNU, WRI and partners in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil) and the Wellcome Climate Impacts Award focused on unlocking climate action (with IIHS, ACC, KDI, SLURC and IDS).

Anna has over 10 years of experience co-producing action research on urban poverty and informality with long-term partners in sub–Saharan Africa and Latin America. She leads a new programme of work that promotes the development of mitigation-focused climate actions that also tackle urban inequalities.

Anna is the IIED lead for the IKI-funded Transformative Urban Coalitions programme (with DIE, UNU, WRI and partners in Argentina, Mexico and Brazil) and the British Academy funded 'Grassroots insights into urban risk' project (with CCI in Tanzania).

Expertise

Urban climate action; urban poverty and informality; water and sanitation; the role of civil society and partnerships in poverty reduction; ethnographic and participatory action research.

Before IIED

Education

  • PhD STEPS Centre, Institute of Development Studies
  • MSc development planning, Development Planning Unit, UCL. BSc Anthropology, UCL

Current work

How marginalised urban communities, local governments and international agencies can develop inclusive planning processes and co-produced responses to urban poverty and climate breakdown in order to forge more equitable and sustainable cities.

Video playlist

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