About Us – Just Transition

A practical approach

The lab

Our work unfolds within the nurturing environment of a “learning lab”, where we practically test assumptions, technologies, business models, and the underlying workstreams that ensure authentic, context-sensitive, and sustainable solutions are developed.

You ask, we answer

What value do we bring?

Concrete opportunities with the potential to scale

An adaptive and collaborative approach and a capable and invested team

We are entrepreneurs embedded in the global South.
We have skills and experience relevant to the Just Transition, project development, and venture building.
We have access to land, farmers, and markets, and are well positioned to drive successful outcomes on the ground.
We are active in shaping the Just Transition knowledge base, policies, and corporate responses, and are invested in the future economic prosperity of the global South, South Africa and Mpumalanga.

Knowledge products and broader impact

We have hosted webinars on our lessons in piloting economic diversification options to repurpose a coal mine in Mpumalanga South Africa.
We presented on challenges & lessons in exploring & interrogating the Just Transition opportunity space at the BRICS Parliamentary Forum.
Members of our team are supporting the South African negotiation delegation at COP28 this year, providing Just Transition expertise drawing on experience in the lab.

Just Trasition team

Meet our team

Anthony Dane

Anthony is a decarbonisation specialist with extensive experience supporting private sector clients, donors, and governments to evaluate technology options, develop decarbonisation pathways, set targets, design programmes, and analyse and report on performance. He has over 15 years of sustainability experience focused on energy, climate change mitigation, and development while working in the consulting sector, an energy start-up, academia, and the mining industry.

Anthony founded Change Pathways in 2015 aiming to create a climate research and advisory services model that can bring together transdisciplinary teams to tackle complex climate change and development challenges. He is also an entrepreneur exploring projects and ventures in the Just Transition, renewable energy, and low-carbon technology space.

Lauren Hermanus

Lauren is a sustainable development researcher and practitioner with more than twelve years’ experience working with governments, intergovernmental agencies, funders, businesses, academia, and civil society (including labour) focusing on climate resilience, just energy transitions (JET), and development planning and governance, with a particular interest in issues of decentralisation and systems transformations. She is the director of Southern Transitions; a climate and transition think tank and director of How We Adapt. The latter is a network-based consultancy that has led the Just Urban Transitions Project in South Africa, which she used to contribute to the JET Investment Plan for the first global JET partnership.

She is also a Board member of the Mpumalanga Green Cluster and a research associate at the University of Cape Town’s African Centre for Cities. She applies a complexity-informed lens to all her work, applying future thinking and anticipatory planning and governance in her practice.

John Thorne

John Thorne works as an independent consultant in the green economy and climate change sectors in sub-Saharan Africa. He has a track record of successful project delivery across a diverse range of related projects. His career has been shaped by three distinct phases: his early career as a doctor; then as an entrepreneur in software where he founded several companies, built a global client base, raised venture capital and graduated with an executive MBA; and for the past twelve years working in climate change and development with a sub-Saharan Africa focus, including a decade at SouthSouthNorth where he designed and managed the implementation of the Hopefield Home Improvement Project (HHIP) which was selected as a flagship community project of South Africa’s Renewable Energy Programme. This experience has provided him with a broad set of leadership and technical skills coupled with a systems perspective, understanding how to engage both private and public sector stakeholders, and strong financial literacy.

Owen van Dongen

Owen has over 10 years of experience in transformation, specialising in small business development. He is interested in driving socioeconomic change through opportunities presented in the transition to net zero.

He has managed multiple Enterprise Development programmes across diverse industries, including projects at the intersection between mining and community development. Owen has a postgrad in Sustainable development planning complimenting his experience in commerce.

Gregory Dane

Greg is the CEO of Blue Mining Services. He is an entrepreneur and an astute businessman with an extensive network of coal miners and farmers in Mpumalanga. He is also a partner in a private equity firm that has experience in mining, energy and agriculture in the region. His team consists of chartered accountants and project finance specialists.