Affiliation: University of the Witwatersrand
Dr. Andrea Marais-Potgieter is a Conservation Psychologist and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has 20 years experience in conducting qualitative psychological research across 17 African countries. Her PhD research employed a mixed methods approach combined with Grounded Theory to explore individuals’ relationships with nature. This exploration was viewed from a systems perspective, considering factors such as childhood experiences, values, worldviews, personality, and environmental views.
She is fascinated by how these complex psychological systems might impact climate change perceptions, adaptive capacity, and the future of the human-nature nexus. Her body of work encompasses topics such as climate change risk perception, mortality salience, community-driven conservation, ecopsychology, human deprivileging, and trans-species accompaniment.
Andrea is a qualified applied ecopsychology practitioner with the International Ecopsychology Society. She will focus on the qualitative futures component of the Solving-FCB research and will help design tools and support workshops to use the Nature Futures Framework across the case studies.
