Geneva List
Senior Staff Associate
Background
Geneva List is a Senior Staff Associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) part of the Columbia Climate School. She is a development practitioner and applied researcher who works at the intersection of climate and agriculture. She specializes in climate risk management programming and evaluation of climate services. Her goal is to improve our understanding of adaptation in order to make meaningful improvements in people’s lives around the world.
Geneva is the IRI country coordinator in Ghana and Mali for the World Bank-funded AICCRA Project “Accelerating the Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research in Africa” and heads IRI’s monitoring, evaluation and learning efforts. Previously at the IRI, she was the monitoring and evaluation Lead for the first Columbia World Project, ACToday (Adapting Agriculture to Climate Today, for Tomorrow), which aimed to develop climate service solutions to help achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 “zero hunger”.
Prior to joining IRI, Geneva worked at the Inter-American Development Bank where she supported climate finance and agricultural programming in Latin America and the Caribbean. She also worked as a climate change and environment sustainability Policy Analyst at the former Canadian International Development Agency (now Global Affairs Canada) and for the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund at the International Development Research Centre. She is passionate about working with stakeholders and beneficiaries in the field and has contributed to NGO programming on disaster relief and socio-economic development in Nicaragua and Peru.
Geneva holds a Master of Arts from McGill University in Geography and Development Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Victoria, British Columbia in Geography with an interdisciplinary minor in International Development. She has published her research in Climate Risk Management, Climate and Development, Natural Hazards, and the Journal of Hydrology.