Board of directors

Shaila is serving at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) as Senior Advisor- Climate Change, DRR and Gender. With 15+ years of experience, Shaila has been working in the arena of action research, capacity building of different stakeholders, and policy advocacy level regionally and globally on gender issues. She is Advisory Board Member of Stakeholder Engagement Mechanism (SEM), UNDRR Geneva. She is the winner of Mary Fran Myers Disaster Scholarship award for 2019 from the Natural Hazards Centre, Colorado University, USA. In 2018 Shaila served as Lead Discussant in the High Level Political Forum on the review of SDG 11. Shaila has been awarded for the Charles Wallace fellowship by British Council in 2018. She is an environmental lawyer, climate advocate and a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Fellow with long experience in Disaster Risk Reduction, Integrated Water Resources Management, Climate Change Adaptation and building community resilience.

Since 2010, Ramatsobane Dorah Marema has been one the founders of GenderCC Southern Africa.

For many years, Dorah was the Executive Director of the GreenHouse Project, an environmental NGO based in Johannesburg, South Africa. There, Dorah Lebelo was responsible for setting up a variety of projects, among them a permaculture project in a park in a poor and run-down neighbourhood in Johannesburg. This project aims to demonstrate to the surrounding inhabitants and passers-by how to live sustainably, i.e. gardening, composting etc. Other program areas include green building and design, efficiency and renewable energy and waste management/ recycling project.

In 2008, Dorah founded GenderCC Southern Africa, an independent branch of GenderCC. She is currently implementing a range of projects in the region and is also GenderCC’s Focal Point in Africa.

Gotelind Alber is GenderCC's treasurer and also takes part in the decision-making processes of the Steering Group.

Gotelind is based in Berlin and is an independent researcher and consultant. She is a physicist and has 25 years experience in research, policy and management, including as a past managing director of the Climate Alliance of European Cities. Currently, Gotelind is working as an independent consultant on energy and climate policy, energy efficiency and renewable energy, multi-level governance, gender and climate justice. She was also one of the co-founders of GenderCC – Women for Climate Justice.

She has been following the UNFCCC process from the very beginning in order to connect international climate policy with local approaches in industrialised and developing countries. Her recent projects include papers and a policy guidebook on “gender, cities and climate change” for UN-HABITAT and the GIZ, as well as various national and EU evaluation panels, including for the EU Horizon 2020 programme. To find our more, visit her website.

Patricia Glazebrook is Professor of Philosophy at Washington State University. She is widely known as an environmental philosopher and ecofeminist though her work is interdisciplinary and uses empirical, sociological and ethnographic methods of data collection. Since 2002, she has been working with women subsistence farmers in northeast Ghana to record impacts of climate change on their crops, food security and nutrition, and to document their adaptation strategies. She has also written on food security in Africa more generally. She has published on gender in UNFCCC policy and in Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and currently studies the capacity of international climate finance to meet the needs of women agriculturalists.

Birte Rodenberg is a sociologist and holding a PhD. Based in Berlin, she is working as an independent consultant and evaluator, and has always placed her emphasis on gender and women’s rights issues, linking these concerns to issues of sustainability and climate change. Already in the beginnings of the gender & climate justice debate, as a policy advisor for governmental development institutions, she has authored studies on the missing links of international development policy instruments and women’s rights issues (i.e. NAPAs). As a trainer for international NGOs she has facilitated many workshops and seminars from a gender perspective on SDGs, urban development, climate change induced migration, and NDCs. On the background of her international experience and participation in conferences, CSO forums and lately, having represented the CEDAW Alliance of German women’s NGOs at the official UN hearings (2016 & 2017), she wants to support the objectives of the GenderCC-network, not only as an individual member, but as part of the team of the Board of Directors - towards a gender-just, inclusive and sustainable societal change.