Jon Lovett

I first went to Tanzania in 1979 to conduct research on the mountain forests in the east of the country and continued until 1992 with most of that time spent in Tanzania and much of it living inside the forest.

After 1992 I continued my work in Tanzania as the senior environmental advisor for the Lower Kihansi Hydropower Project and also conducted assessments of catchment forests in the northern part of the country.

Together with students I compiled a continental database of African plant distributions during the 1990s resulting in a series of publications in the early 2000s. This work was extended more recently with a Global Environment Facility project in collaboration with the University of Stellenbosch on the potential effect of climate change on biodiversity in African protected areas.

Together with partners in Tanzania, Uganda and the Republic of Congo I have led a series of projects on capacity building and research for renewable energy generation and distribution that resulted in both research papers and open source microgrid software, together with two massive open online courses, one on bioenergy and the other on microgrids. The projects also produced a Ugandan TV drama and a feature film with renewable energy integral to the plot and events.