Leo Zulu Leo Zulu is an Associate Professor of Geography at Michigan State University, in the USA. He has more than 25 years of combined international experience on natural resources management, biodiversity conservation and coordination, human dimensions of land use and cover change, environment and development, community-based natural resources management, climate change governance, and vulnerability and adaptation of rural communities in southern Africa to climate change adaptation in LDCs especially Africa, training on the use of modern Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing analysis in climate change adaptation planning under NAPAs and NAPs. He has also provided expertise to the LDC Experts Group (LEG) and worked with the UNFCCC Secretariat, including training LDC and SIDs national experts on the use of GIS and remote sensing for developing of NAPAs, vulnerability analysis, writing technical papers on adverse effects of climate change under decision 1/CP.10, paragraph 14 (http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2007/sbi/eng/24.pdf), NAPA preparation, design of implementation strategies and submission of updated priority activities (http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/publications/ldc_tp2009.pdf), and financing mechanisms for non-Annex 1 countries, and the transition from NAPAs to NAPs; and providing technical expertise on the development of NAP guidelines. NAP development generally.
Recent work includes a review of climate change research on agriculture in Malawi, an ongoing 5-year postdoctoral training project (2014-19) on the link between irrigated agriculture and malaria under climate change in Malawi, and facilitation as a resource person in the priority-setting workshop for the Southern Africa sub-region in the context of the Lima Adaptation Knowledge Initiative (LAKI) held in Johannesburg in March 2015 (http://www4.unfccc.int/sites/NWP/News/Pages/LAKI%20Southern%20Africa.aspx). He is also part of another ongoing 5-year (to 2019) USAID funded forestry project (Protecting Ecosystems and Restoring Forests in Malawi) helping Malawi to build the capacity in multiple dimensions to prepare for REDD+. As part of the that project, Leo is currently leading the development of a Malawi National Charcoal Strategy to make way for more sustainable production of charcoal while seeking affordable energy alternatives. Leo also conducts on the use of GIS on disparities in access to health services and in modeling spatio-temporal patterns of HIV in Africa, and has worked with the UNAIDS The Subnational Estimates Working Group of the HIV Modelling Consortium (e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26919737, http://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-14-285. His experience professional includes more than 9 years of university teaching, training and graduate student supervision on climate and related adaptation research in Africa and training, including international students from LDCs.