Meet the team

Renata Jagustovic

Consortium Manager, ARCS, NORCAP

Jon Einar Flåtnes

Senior Researcher, CMI

Rondrotiana Barimalala

Senior Researcher, NORCE

Renata Jagustovic is a programme leader with over 15 years of expertise in designing and managing complex climate adaptation and resilience initiatives across Africa. As the Consortium Manager for ARCS, she oversees a multi-million-dollar portfolio funded by Norad to implement climate-resilient food systems through climate information services. As a NORCAP representative at the Africa Climate Summit, she provides extensive expertise in fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships among governments, UN agencies, and research institutions to strengthen climate services and early warning systems.

She can be reached at renata.jagustovic@nrc.no

Flåtnes is an applied development economist working on poverty, resilience, and climate adaptation among poor and vulnerable populations. His research has focused on understanding how innovative financial products, such as microfinance and insurance contracts, can help mitigate risk and improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Some topics he has explored include social and conventional collateral in joint liability group lending, the effect of climate change on insurance demand, optimal design of index insurance contracts using remote sensing data, and complementarities between insurance and other technologies. He has experience conducting field research, including large-scale interventions and lab-in-the-field experiments, and he has participated in projects taking place in Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana, and China. He received his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis in 2015 and previously worked as an assistant professor at the Ohio State University.

He can be reached at joneinar.flatnes@cmi.no

Rondrotiana Barimalala is a climate scientist based at the Norwegian Research Centre, with interests in African climate variability and predictability on subseasonal to decadal timescales. She received her PhD degree from the University of Trieste, Italy, with her research on the teleconnection between the tropical Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Ocean basins, and its impact on regional rainfall. For the past years, she has been focusing on the mechanisms leading to rainfall variability over the southern and eastern Africa regions. She has been working closely with the national meteorological services in African countries as well, to the aim of improving the usefulness of climate information in different sectors.

She can be reached at ronb@norceresearch.no