Anne-Teresa Birthwright
Vice-President

Anne-Teresa holds a PhD in Geography from the University of the West Indies, Mona with experience in rural livelihood, food security, and climate change adaptation. She has worked with various local and regional multidisciplinary projects centred on reducing risk to climate change and improving the livelihoods of rural communities. She has a broad interest in the field of agriculture, with particular emphasis on the challenges and opportunities surrounding rural livelihood development.

Her PhD work with both Blue Mountain and High Mountain smallholder coffee farmers has found that, Jamaica coffee farmers are indeed vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. However, their vulnerability has been further compounded by the political economy of the industry. These farmers are vulnerable not because of a lack of agency, but lack of opportunities along the coffee value chain shaped by systemic inefficiencies and uneven power relations.

Her interest in action-oriented research and improving rural livelihoods has also led her to being the recipient of the 2017 Prime Minister’s Youth Award for Excellence in International Achievement. As a research consultant, Anne-Teresa has collaborated to produce several national documents including Jamaica’s first Climate Change Research Agenda which champions the role of science in solving societal problems, as well as supports the achievement of climate change targets identified in national policy frameworks. Similarly, she co-authored Jamaica’s first Adaptation Communication (AdCom). As an inaugural document, the development of Jamaica’s AdCom was crucial in the negotiation process at the United Nations 26th Conference of Parties on Climate Change (COP26) held in Glasgow, Scotland.

Recently, she successfully co-designed and co-managed JAWiC’s first grant funding from the 2020/2021 Canadian Funds for Local Initiatives (CFLI) under the project “Strengthening the Capacity of Women Coffee Farmers through Training”. She also authored JAWiC’s Field Survey Initiative Pilot Project Report (2020) which captured preliminary data on the livelihood experiences of women coffee farmers.

Currently, she is a Science, Technology and Policy (STeP) Fellow with the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) where she works to strengthen science diplomacy on global environmental change across the Americas.