Biography
Zeina Moneer is a Senior Environmental Policy Analyst and a Senior Climate Practitioner. She holds a PhD in Environmental Politics from Freiburg University in Germany. She was Visiting Scholar to a number of renowned international educational institutions including the Institute of Social-ecology, Alpen-Adria University in Vienna, Austria and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. In 2021, She was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar to New Hampshire University in the USA. She worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Institute for a Sustainable Environment of the American University in Cairo.
She has a solid research background in the nexus of humanitarian and development issues, climate justice, green transition in the MENA, gender responsive climate policies, climate-induced security risks in fragile and conflict-affected states, conflict management and disaster risk management, etc.
In addition to her academic accomplishments, she has an extensive professional experience working as a Senior Climate Change Program Manager in multiple national and international NGOs and development agencies, leading the development and the implementation of a wide variety of climate action projects in the MENA region and Africa. These projects cover key thematic areas include food security and sovereignty, community resilience and sustainable livelihoods, climate-induced migration at the nexus of climate change and conflicts, and anticipatory action and early warning systems. In addition, Zeina Moneer works as a freelance climate journalist and writes both in Arabic and English covering a wide variety of topics that are related to climate change and green transition particularly in the MENA.
Due to her prime role in facilitating multi-stakeholders dialogues, consistent publications about the abovementioned interlinked issues and her leading role in designing and implementing development projects and climate interventions in the MENA, She was recognised in 2025 by the Union for the Mediterranean as one of the changemakers who shape discourses about policy debates linked to climate change policies and solutions in the MENA region.
As a Policy Leader Fellow, she plans to develop evidence-based recommendations to enhancing understanding among climate professionals of the intersectional approaches to the gendered impacts of climate change in rural communities in Egypt. In addition, it is planned to develop a toolkit that could help climate professionals and local actors by providing a set of guidelines to illicit the power dynamics at play associated with gender that reinforce vulnerability to climate change and enable women in rural communities in Egypt to articulate their concerns, needs and priorities for building resilience to climate change and clarify the complex relationships that affect long-term resilience of rural livelihoods.
The intended audience for the tool includes climate practitioners, rural communities and their representatives, local government, and community-based organisations (CBOs) aiming to better understand dynamics of local vulnerabilities, represent and integrate local climate priorities into adaptation-relevant planning and interventions.