Climate change is the biggest challenge facing current and future generations. The world’s poorest people and communities will feel its impacts the hardest, as they have lower capacity to deal with damage from more volatile weather, rising sea levels, more frequent natural disasters, food insecurity and habitat loss.
International development specialists, environmental scientists, engineers, natural resource economists and others bring knowledge and skills to work alongside communities and help them prepare for extreme weather events, protect homes, and land, and mitigate the effect of climate change on infrastructure, the environment and livelihoods.
Climate change will impact every role in the sector so come along to hear from speakers who support communities with sustainable climate change adaptation and mitigation projects that build community resilience and reduce the impact of natural disasters. Our speakers will also share how their experiences have shaped their career in the aid and development sector.
As usual, the night will involve a relaxed chat facilitated by WiAD city leaders with questions to follow, and it will be an excellent opportunity to network.
Everyone is welcome, so please share the event with your friends and colleagues.
Meet the Speakers
Susanne Legena
Susanne is the CEO of child rights organisation Plan International Australia. Susanne is a passionate feminist, champion of young people and believer that humans have more that unites us than divides us.
With a keen interest in design thinking and human-centred design, Susanne is interested in co-designing solutions to wicked problems like poverty, gender equality and climate change.
Plan International works across south-east Asia and the Pacific to help communities adapt to climate change, to make sure children, women and marginalised groups are involved to help shape the design of local projects.
Heidi Michael
Heidi is a chartered executive-level engineer and leader with experience working in private, public and community development sectors across a broad range of social impact engineering and infrastructure projects. She thrives on strategy development, engaging stakeholders and building collaborations, and leading and facilitating technical teams to achieve sustainable social outcomes. Heidi has a track record of designing and delivering inclusive and collaborative social infrastructure projects, across Australia and Asia Pacific technical sectors.
Mary Picard
Mary has been consulting on disaster-climate-development policy coherence for over 15 years including: analysis of laws, policies, institutions, and how to get systems working more effectively. The last five years of her work has been working on converging on the nexus between gender equality and reducing risk from disasters and climate change. Currently (since the COVID-19 pandemic began) Mary is working on more global projects, as well as in Asia and the Pacific. Some of her focus areas are: increasing the emphasis on risk governance, gender equality in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, and governments working with civil society and the private sector.