Kate Williamson

Kate Williamson, who joined SEI Oxford in October 2022, is a Research Associate, focusing on climate change adaptation and developing an urban toolkit to promote learning opportunities for improving city health and well-being.

She works with a number of projects, including:

• MAIA  (Maximising Impact and Accessibility of European Climate Research) – a project that is intended to give visibility to and connect European research.
• Adaptation at Altitude – a programme that seeks to increase the resilience and capacity of mountain communities and ecosystems to adapt to climate change.
• the SEI Initiative on City Health and Well-being – a project that investigates how rapidly growing cities are affecting the well-being of residents, and how this interacts with the overall health of city systems.
• the Adaptation Without Borders Initiative – a project that explores the global implications of transboundary climate risks, and aims to strengthen cooperation among a range of partners to meet the global challenge of adaptation to climate change.
• weADAPT – SEI’s signature, global climate change adaptation platform and network.

Kate has a master’s degree (MSc) in Climate Change: Environment, Science and Policy from King’s College London. Her MSc dissertation assessed the extent to which a climate change citizens’ assembly shaped climate policymaking at the local authority scale, using both interviews and document analysis. She has a bachelor’s degree in geography, with a year of international study at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), from the University of Manchester. Her undergraduate thesis used focus groups and surveys to explore university students’ perceptions of carbon taxes and how these related to imagined low-carbon futures.

During her degrees, Kate undertook internship placements at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford, which provided an insight into the world of research, and at the environmental charity Ashden, where she supported learning opportunities in city-level climate action through their co-benefits toolkit. This inspired her to better understand the relationship between different types of knowledge and climate policy in her MSc work.