Director / AXA Research Chair

ACDI: African Climate & Development Initiative

 Email: mark.new@uct.ac.za

Academic Profile

Mark New was appointed Pro-VC for Climate Change and Director of the ACDI in July 2011. He holds a joint appointment as Professor of of International Development at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. His research focuses on climate change detection, processes, scenarios, impacts and adaptation.  He sits on the SA Global Change Science Committee, the Africa Future Earth Science Committee,  is on the editorial board of Environmental Research Letters, and has served on various other science committees and reference groups.

Current Research

In his research on climate change monitoring and detection he has worked on the development of global and regional climate datasets which have underpinned climate impacts assessments and integrated modelling, the detection of climate extremes, and issues around uncertainty and accuracy of climate data.

His work on climate change scenarios includes the UNDP climate change profiles which provide a consistent set of climate scenarios for over fifty developing countries, and scenarios for islands of the Caribbean as part of the CARIBSAVE project; a key interest with regard to scenarios has been approaches to represent uncertainty in future climate.

His research on impacts and adaptation has addressed broader adaptation policy issues around high-end climate change and dangerous climate impacts, approaches to adaptation decision making under uncertainty. Much of this work has been applied through the lens of water resource planning, such as in the EPSRC project he leads, ARCC-Water – Adaptive and Resilient Water Systems.