Sophie Rigg is ActionAid UK’s Senior Climate and Resilience Advisor. She has an MA in Disasters, Adaptation and Development from Kings College London and a BA from the University of Bristol. She is also in the process of completing a Master of Public Administration with an elective focus on climate policy from the University of Birmingham. Her past experience includes working on the DFID funded Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) program in Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, focused on the relationship between climate information systems and community resilience. Sophie has also worked for UNOPS on their Livelihoods and Food Security Trust Fund program, based in Yangon, Myanmar, as well as for Plan International UK and for the UN Foundation, where she worked on their data4climate and SDGs initiative. She is bilingual in French and English.

Sophie’s role in DOWN2EARTH is to provide technical support on community-led climate change adaptation and gender transformative research. She works closely with colleagues in ActionAid Kenya, Ethiopia and Somaliland, who co-lead the community research and engagement component of DOWN2EARTH with our University partners. Together they are building on our long-term relationships with the communities in question to enable an inclusive approach to community research and better understand how climatic shocks and trends are threatening the sustainability of water resources for food security and livelihoods. Our research will uncover the gendered nature of decision-making around climate adaptation and resilience to support the work of our consortium partners that are leading on the development of decision-support tools for adaptation and resilience.