Gordon A. Mackenzie is Senior advisor in the Project management and Communications group at UNEP Copenhagen Climate Centre and formerly Head of the Cleaner Energy Development (CED) Programme (2007-2018).
He was educated at Edinburgh University as a physicist (BSc 1973, PhD 1976) and the initial years of his professional career were as an experimental physicist, partly based at the Risø National Laboratory, specializing in investigation of crystalline materials with neutron scattering. In 1980 he moved to the Energy Systems Group, subsequently the Systems Analysis Department, at Risø to work on energy modelling and planning. From 1984 to 87, he was Energy Advisor/Deputy Director in Zambia, funded by Danida.
In 1990, he was a founder member of the UNEP Risø Centre (URC) on Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development, later to become UNEP DTU Partnership. From 1999 to 2002 he was Energy Advisor/Chief Technical Advisor in Danish-funded support to the Government of Lesotho’s Department of Energy, developing a new energy policy framework, a survey of wind energy resources and general capacity building. In this period he also trained Ghana Energy Commission staff to implement the LEAP energy model for the national energy policy, SNEP.
At UNEP DTU, he managed and participated in EU-funded projects in Africa (DEA, CEMA and PACEAA), UNEP’s energy SME programme AREED, been country coordinator for Antigua & Barbuda, Belize, Bhutan, Dominica, Egypt, Grenada, Guyana, Jordan, Kenya, Seychelles, Trinidad & Tobago, and Zambia in the UNEP/GEF Technology Needs Assessment (TNA) programme (phases I, II and III), and was involved in the assessment of outcomes and impacts of two large UN Environment activities: AREED and the Global Network on Energy for Sustainable Development (GNESD). Recently he has been been project manager for training programmes on developing GCF concept notes in Guyana, Jordan, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
As part of the Project Management and Communications group, he is currently supporting all programmes on tendering, project development and proposal writing, including development of Theory of Change, LFAs and KPIs.
