Contact

  • Phone: (204) 958-7706
  • Fax: (204) 958-7710
  • E-mail
English Français

Staff and Associates

Henry David Venema, PhD

» Director - Sustainable Natural Resources Management

Dr. Henry David Venema directs IISD's Sustainable Natural Resources Management Programme, which has a thematic focus on water and agricultural issues in Western Canada. Dr. Venema is a professional engineer and natural resource management consultant with extensive experience in rural development, environmental economics, water resources planning, and energy sector planning in North America, Africa, and Asia. Dr. Venema leads IISD's current research on the Valuation of Natural Capital in Prairie Canada, Institutional Linkages between Payments for Ecosystem Services and Integrated Water Resources Management in Prairie Watersheds, and Governance Models for Lake Winnipeg Stewardship. Dr. Venema is also the principal investigator of the NRCan-funded project, Adaptation as Resilience Building: A policy study of climate change vulnerability and adaptation on the Canadian Prairies and co-directs the IDRC-funded project, Adaptive Policy-making for Agriculture and Water Resources in the Face of Climate Change. Other relevant Canadian project experience includes leading the first ever valuation of The Full Costs of Thermal Power in Eastern Canada, based on source-receptor modeling and health and climate externalities.

In the international context, Dr. Venema was lead IISD researcher on the CIDA-funded project, Climate change and economic changes in India: the impacts on agriculture, in partnership with the The Energy and Resources Institute (New Delhi) and CICERO (Oslo). Dr. Venema's research on systems approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation has appeared in the Journal of Environmental Management, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change and Global Environmental Change, and has been widely cited by the IPCC's Third and Fourth Assessment Reports on Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Dr. Venema also served as an expert consultant on cross-cutting issues and Working Group 2 (Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability) reviewer for the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. His research has appeared in the international development, water resources, hydrology, operations research and renewable energy literature.

Dr. Venema is a gold medalist in Physics and Civil Engineering from the Universities of Winnipeg and Manitoba respectively. Venema also holds Master's Degree in Water Resources Engineering from the University of Ottawa and holds a PhD in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo where he was both an NSERC 1967 Science and Engineering Scholar and IDRC Doctoral Research Scholar.

Dr. Venema's PhD research concerns landscape-based systems models for integrated rural development and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Dr. Venema's field experience includes lengthy assignments with Environnment et Development Action (ENDA) in Senegal, and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India. Dr. Venema has also lived and worked in Sweden and Ethiopia on research and consulting assignments.



Publications