Nair de Sousa is a Climate Geoscientist and Energy Consultant, who has a genuine enthusiasm for advancing the Energy Sector in Africa through fighting against Climate Changes. 

Currently serving as the Energy Sustainability Director at the African Circular Business Alliance her work focuses on the implementation of low-carbon technologies in multiple sectors. This role entails developing energy sustainability and management plans for ensuring that power and industrial facilities are compliant to a net-zero future based on rigorous energy audits that identify energy-intensive processes and evaluate energy-saving opportunities. In this role, Nair integrates multi-skills obtained from her brilliant and diverse career that started as a geoscientist, field engineer, reservoir engineer and policy framework analyst. With these diverse portfolio of skills, Nair has developed the ability to integrate diferent knowledge and transfer it into a distinguishable way to establish innovative performance metrics for and  monitoring systems that allow to solve the Climate Change Crisis. 

Before her current role, Nair was part of a team of a team of policy, economics and technical experts that have helped advance some of the most important carbon capture and storage policies to date in the US and Europe. From this experience, she developed understanding of the business models, technical, and policy experience in the US and Europe, and is currently making it relevant to the context of emerging markets in African countries.

Ms Sousa leads ACBA’s Geosciences & Technology deployment teams responsible for supporting businesses, organisations, communities and governments in improving their NDCs by implementing circular economy strategies, regulatory frameworks for technology deployment into domestic markets. Her current research includes assessing & quantifying the carbon/methane emissions released by industrial processes necessary to develop new markets, especially carbon markets for multiple purposes (reduction, protection and removal). Nair is currently assessing the capacity for permanent storage of CO2 in geological reservoirs in countries like Angola and Nigeria for supporting emission reduction in multiple-sectors and build regional infrastructure for capturing carbon, transport and permanent underground storage.

This experience allows the creation of comprehensive management plans that includes defining strategies, timelines, identifying responsible parties, and expected energy production and cost saving analysis. Ms Sousa’s work is particularly relevant to the urgent need in Sustainable Development in Africa and the need for African countries to comply with the climate global ambitions in a way that ensures countries are adapted and resilient .

Having a BSc. in Geology, a post-degree in Research Methods in Geosciences and a MSc. Reservoir Evaluation and Management, Nair has recently reinforced her skills in Financial Risk Management and Sustainability & Climate Risk to more efficiently accommodate smarter solutions for a sustainable net-zero economy in Africa. 

Nair believes that building valuable Circular Markets and infrastructure in Africa, especially in the space of hydrogen and carbon, is a critical step that African governments and businesses should embrace to provide sustainable-bankable solutions for current issues such as underdevelopment, energy poverty and energy dependence.

Nair is a member of the Global Women’s Network for the Energy Transition (GWNET), member of the African Hydrogen Hub (AHH), a Young African Leader (YALI) and a 2021 Mandela Washington Fellow Alumni who has been striving in “Transforming the Africa We Want” by impacting and supporting governments and businesses to transform the life of people within African communities and the world.