Karen is a senior researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria, South Africa, where she works as an Environmental Anthropologist. She brings socio-economic and socio-cultural insights to the oftentimes technical challenges her interdisciplinary team works on. She has twenty years’ experience working as an Anthropologist. This has afforded her the opportunity to engage with stakeholder groups, in particular communities, relying on local knowledge to help understand and solve environmental, socio-cultural and development issues. She received her BA, BA Hons and MA with distinction in Anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), and her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Johannesburg (UJ). Her PhD examines the manner in which scarcity of natural resources is socially constructed to go beyond the conventional and current dominant framings of natural resource scarcity. It advocates the interrogation of the intuitive metaphors, frameworks of explanation, socio-political processes, worldviews and epistemologies within which narratives of scarcity are constructed and produced. As a part of the HABITABLE team, Karen will deploy her expertise to contribute to WP4. Using her skills as an environmental Anthropologist and qualitative research methodology expert, she will contribute to the analysis of micro and meso level coping strategies and adaptation solutions.