Brett Cohen

Prof Brett Cohen has an undergraduate and PhD degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Brett has worked on sustainability-related projects in South Africa, Australia, Peru, India, Chile, Botswana, Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the United Kingdom, in both consulting and academic contexts. Brett is also an Honorary Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cape Town.

His contribution to TGH Think Space is related to climate risks and opportunities, energy and climate change scenario and futures planning and policy development, technology assessment, industrial ecology, decision support, policy development, research, strategy development and stakeholder engagement, training and workshop facilitation. His interests include decision support frameworks, tools and modelling paradigms for supporting complex decision-making in the context of sustainability. His work draws on experience from chemical process engineering, multi-criteria decision analysis techniques, network theories, natural systems, complex systems analysis and economics.

Brett is a C2 National Research Foundation (NRF) rated researcher, has published extensively in academic journals and presented at a number of international conferences. He has been appointed as a Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report (AR6), has been appointed to the UNFCCC Roster of Experts on climate change matters related to UNFCCC activities, and sits on the University of Cape Town’s pre-seed concept fund steering committee which provides support for commercialisation of research studies.