Dr. Anna Steynor

Areas of expertise

• Climate Services (particularly in the context of the global South)
• Transdisciplinary co-production of climate science for policy and practice
• Environmental psychology of climate information use and decision-making
• Capacity development and stakeholder engagement

Current activities

Anna joined the Met Office in 2022 as a Senior Climate Services Scientist and is currently the Science Manager of the seasonal to climate applications team in International Applied Sicence and Services. Her role includes leading stakeholder engagement and transdisciplinary co-production processes as well as leading on aspects of social science.  

She is currently co-leading a work package of the WCSSP South Africa project, with a particular focus on sharing learning on the implementation of the National Framework for Climate Services between South Africa and the UK.  She is also leading an activity within the CSSP China project on practically applying climate resilient development pathways thinking in the UK wheat supply chain.  In addition, she is a researcher in the Early Warning for Southern Africa project under the WISER Africa technical assistance and partnership programme and a researcher in the Co-production of Climate Services for East Africa (CONFER) project.

Anna is an associate editor for the Journal of Environmental Science and Policy and is a review editor for Frontiers in Climate: Climate Risk Management.  

Career background

Anna began her career as a researcher at the Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town.  In this role she developed educational resources on climate change and worked on a project using enhanced knowledge of climate variability for the benefit of water resource management.  In 2006 she joined the UK Climate Impacts Programme (Oxford University) as a Science Officer.  In this role, Anna provided advice and support to UK stakeholders on climate adaptation. She had a particular focus on the first probabilistic projections for the UK (UK Climate Projections 2009), developing guidance, an enquiries facility and case studies of application.  In 2011, Anna returned to the Climate System Analysis Group, University of Cape Town as the Head of Climate Services. In this role, she led the group’s climate services research and consulting activities focusing, particularly, on the transdisciplinary co-production of climate services.  Anna studied at the University of Cape Town. She holds an MSc in Applied Climate Science and a PhD with a thesis entitled ‘Exploring the role of climate change risk perceptions in informing climate services for adaptation in East Africa’.