Diane Douglas

Area of Expertise:

• Disaster, Aid, Emergencies, Relief
• Environment, Climate, Energy, Water, Sanitation
• Monitoring, Evaluation, Policy, Research, Analysis
• Private Sector, Social Enterprise, Corporate Social Responsibility

Professional Experience:

I have 30 years of experience as a consultant with increasing levels of responsibility. Throughout the 1990's, I served as a project manager and principal investigator for over 100 environmental and social assessments in the western USA. In the early 2000s I became a regional director of cultural resource division for URS Corporation (now AECOM), and from 2007-2011 served as as a Principal Investigator and Chief Marketing Officer for Statistical Research Inc.
Since 2011, I have served as TEAM LEADER AND LEAD AUTHOR on several large scale projects in Eurasia and Africa, including: for the UNDP Bosnia-Herzegovina Country Office and Turkey Regional Office Sub-regional Human Development Report on Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation. I worked with 7 country offices of the UNDP and the Istanbul Regional Hub to gather data and evaluate climate change, flood risks and other climate associated hazards for vulnerable populations (women, children, elderly, disabled, migrants) in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. The work encompassed a risk analysis and vulnerability assessment for rural and urban centers in the 7 countries, and developing a plan to make these countries more resilient to climate induced hazards.

TEAM LEADER AND LEAD AUTHOR: for a SESA for REDD+ Implementation in Mozambique, funded by the World Bank. The project evaluated the potential environmental and social impacts and opportunities associated with implementing a program to reduce deforestation and degradation (REDD) in the country, including evaluating institutional capacity, the country’s legal framework for implementing REDD+ and making recommendations for capacity building and modifying the existing legal framework so that REDD implementation is feasible, identifying other strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enhancing carbon sequestration in the country. The Team Leadership position also included providing oversight of and writing the program Environmental Social Management Framework (ESMF), and Resettlement Policy Framework (RPF), January 2015-June 2016.

TEAM LEADER for the Environmental Social Audit, Environmental Management Plans, and Biodiversity Management Plan, for the Hwange Power Station, Zimbabwe, with funding from the African Development Bank. The project was undertaken in two phases, with the first conducted from Sept 2013- August 2014, and the second from Sept 2015 to January 2016. The first phase provided a gap analysis of existing policies and procedures in place at the HPS to monitor impact of power plant operations on the environmental and nearby communities, evaluated the effectiveness of these policies and procedures and made recommendations for improving them. The study required several meetings with AfDB, HPS operations management, groundwater and surface water studies, examination of current waste water and sewage treatment plants and outflows, biodiversity studies (terrestrial and fresh water), cultural heritage resource investigations (tangible and intangible) to determine how the HPS is affecting these resources. Our team conducted extensive stakeholder engagement and community meetings, and performed a health risk assessment on the neighboring communities. The second phase entailed development of a Biodiversity Management Plan (BMP) for the HPS facility, and provided training and capacity building for implementation of the BMP. Phase 1 Sept 2013-Aug 2014; Phase 2 Sept 2015- January 2016.