Nikole Vanessa Roland

Nikole is an intern at PlanAdapt’s Coordination Hub, supporting remotely from Malaysia.

Nikole is a sustainability researcher and a practised facilitator. Her work helps to identify entry points for climate adaptation by investigating how actors are affected by discrete mechanisms. She has worked on projects exploring the impacts of work-induced migration on small businesses to the reconfiguration of access to water across involved and non-involved groups. She is currently interested in how strategizing, monitoring, evaluation, and learning within and across organizations may facilitate the implementation of climate adaptation processes. Of particular interest to her are the roles small businesses and non-profits play in vitalizing climate adaptation.

A key theme in her research is to investigate the impact of climate change stressors on pre-existing conditions in the Global South. She is experienced using qualitative research methods employing perspectives from the echelons of rights analysis, theory of access, political ecology, and values in prosocial behaviour. Part of her work at the University of Tokyo has been featured in Institutional and socioeconomic transformation from sugarcane expansion in northern Eswatini. She is currently an independent sustainability consultant to Ice World Premium, an agricultural small business in the Kingdom of eSwatini.

She has a master’s in sustainability science from the Graduate Program of Sustainability Science – Global Leadership Initiative (GPSS-GLI) of the University of Tokyo in Japan. Her thesis explored the reasons for conflict within the nexus of climate change, livelihood, and water scarcity in a Global South case study.

For more info, see Nikole’s LinkedIn profile.