About

PKRC is managed by Dr. Patrik Klintenberg. PKRC is mainly active within the environmental sector in southern Africa.

About me
I hold a PhD in Physical Geography that I obtained at Stockholm University, Sweden in 2008. I have gained vast experience about the Namibian environment and the people depending on its resources since 1997. Between For the period 1997 – 2012 I was associated with the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia (DRFN), where I was engaged in a large number of projects, both in the environmental field, but also as an IT developer and administrator, and web designer.

Research
My PhD thesis was based on investigations of how to monitor environmental change in an arid to semi-arid environment. The studies were both national (development and assessment of a national level land degradation monitoring system), and local, investigating perceptions about environmental change held by farmers in central northern Namibia, and detailed assessments of impacts of past and current land uses on natural resources in the Ombuga grassland, a vast grass and shrubland area north of the Etosha National Park.

Supervision of tertiary students
I have arranged several courses for tertiary students from both Namibia and abroad. Most of these courses aimed at investigating the interface between the biophysical environment and the people depending on the environmental resources. Good examples of such courses are: the Summer Desertification Programme (SDP) and Stockholm University Geography Excursion (SUGE), both implemented by the DRFN. The SDP, which was a programme funded by Swedish Sida for a period of 13 years, aimed at providing students from Namibian tertiary institutions with experience of applied research. The SUGE programme, which I have coordinated the last nine years, provides Swedish geography students with opportunities to get in contact with Namibian communities, to learn more about the interactions between man and environment.

I have supervised a large number of Namibian and foreign interns and students within the projects I been part of at the DRFN.

IT
-In the late 1990s I led the development of the IT systems both at DRFN and at the Gobabeb Training and Research Centre in the Namib-Naukluft National Park.
-I have developed several web sites for institutions and projects, using DreamWeaver and WordPress.
-I have some experience of developing dynamic websites using PHP and MySQL, and asp.net and Microsoft SQL server.
-I am currently managing an on-line database at the DRFN, named DLIB.

Current position
Since September 2012 I am appointed as a researcher at Mälardalen University in Västerås, Sweden. There I am looking into various aspects of renewable energy and electrification in southern Africa in both rural and urban settings. I am also giving lectures in remote sensing, statistics and project management.