Dr Marcela Tarazona
Technical and Strategy Lead: Climate
Dr Marcela Tarazona is the Technical and Strategy Lead: Climate. She is based in England.
She is a climate and disaster risk economist with 20 years’ experience spanning climate and disaster risk finance, green growth, public finance, insurance, shock responsive social protection, energy, transport, adaptation, behavioural economics, organisational development, monitoring evaluation and learning, research uptake, capacity development and policy engagement.
She advised the government of Bangladesh on a financial strategy for its social protection system, the government of Mongolia on disaster risk financing and the Central Bank and the Financial Supervision Authority of Colombia on climate change. She has also been an adviser to the Insuresilience Global Partnership and the Commonwealth.
Marcela was the climate finance lead for Action on Climate Today (ACT) (FCDO 2014-2018). She led a team at 10 locations in five South Asian countries on embedding climate finance in budgets and access international sources of climate finance. Marcela co-led the design of trainings on Financing Frameworks for Resilience Growth for the UNFCCC’s Least Developed Countries Expert Group on FFRGs for National Adaptation Plans. The online platform is now hosted by the World Bank.
She was programme director of the Energy and Economic Growth (EEG) Applied Research Programme (FCDO 2014-2018). She was responsible for the overall programme design and the delivery of high-quality research responding to the needs of policymakers in developing countries. More recently she led a review of Transforming Energy Access (TEA) (FCDO 2020), a programme aimed at innovative solutions to support the most vulnerable. She was part of the leading team for High-Volume Transport (HVT), a (FCD) 2018-2020) programme aimed at accessible, affordable and climate friendly transport with a focus on African cities.
Marcela was the team lead for Promoting Integrated Mechanisms for Climate Risk Management and Transfer (GIZ, 2018). She led the development of climate finance country roadmaps for Morocco, Ghana, China and Barbados. She also led the strategic evaluations for the Africa Risk Capacity (FCDO 2014-2018), the Centre for Disaster Protection (FCDO 2018-2020) and the NAMA support programme (GIZ 2018-2020). Marcela worked on low-carbon support (LCS) programme for the Ministry of Finance in Indonesia (FCDO, 2013-2015), providing technical assistance to the fiscal policy office and the Indonesia Investment Agency at the MoF to promote fiscal policy reform and investment, with focus on low-carbon energy.
She has worked in more than 20 countries in Asia, Latin America, Africa and is widely published. Her contributions include those to the AR5 IPCC Assessment Report, the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, the World Development Report and numerous papers published in peer-reviewed journals.
Marcela is also a behavioural economist, and incorporates behavioural and organisational development insights into her consultancy work. She is widely published in academic journals with studies applying behavioural and experimental tools to better understand individual and group decision making in risky situations, applicable to financial decisions and to long term uncertain situations like climate risk, and intra-household allocation norms.
Marcela is fluent in English, French and Spanish and holds a PhD Economics from Toulouse School of Economics and an MBA from the London School of Economics.
