Senior scientist: Associate prof. Charlotte Da Cunha

Charlotte Da Cunha is Associate Professor in Land Use Planning at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and Director of CEARC. Her research focuses on adaptation to climate change and on how territories can navigate profound and sometimes irreversible change. A central concern of her work is justice and equity under changing conditions: how vulnerability is understood, whose interests are taken into account, and how adaptation and transition processes can be made fairer.

Within PREFER, Charlotte contributes her expertise on adaptation planning and on the role of planning when territories face forms of change that challenge established ways of living and organising. Her priority field country is Vietnam, where she works with the project team on communities in the Mekong Delta confronting intertwined environmental, climatic and socio-economic transformations. She is particularly interested in what planning can and cannot do when change becomes extreme, and in how locally grounded knowledge and experience can inform processes of adaptation and transition.

Her research combines qualitative and participatory approaches with prospective methods, the evaluation of adaptation plans and the co-construction of knowledge and governance processes. She has worked extensively on local adaptation planning, including comparisons between French and US cities, and on the role of community engagement and equity in adaptation. Her work has also explored how narratives of change can support community-led foresight and how local initiatives interact with institutional planning.

Charlotte is also interested in bringing different forms of knowledge together, including through experiments at the interface of art and science. In PREFER, this perspective complements the project’s ethnographic work by asking how the insights emerging from local experiences of profound change might inform collective deliberation, planning and action.