Sir: Ogochukwu Gold Abaneme’s latest piece on multi-stakeholder coordination in coastal climate adaptation does something unusual for writing on climate change. It focuses on the science of what’s happening and more on the mechanics of how we’re failing to respond.

In doing so, she identified, perhaps, the most overlooked bottleneck in climate adaptation not our understanding of the problem, but our inability to organise an effective response.

“The biggest obstacle to protecting these communities isn’t lack of knowledge,” Abaneme writes. ‘’ It’s getting everyone to work together effectively.”

It’s a paper that could only come from someone who has spent years in the unglamorous work of coordinating complex projects across fractious stakeholder groups.

What distinguishes Abaneme’s analysis from the typical climate commentary is her professional DNA. As a senior project manager at MaineHealth, specialising in Information Technology (IT) innovation initiatives, she brings a project manager’s sensibility to a problem that desperately needs one.

Where climate scientists speak in parts per million and environmentalists in moral imperatives, Abaneme speaks in stakeholder maps, governance structures and coordination frameworks.

This isn’t to diminish the urgency of the climate crisis, but to recognise that urgency with execution is merely anxiety. Abaneme’s background directing department-wide modernisation efforts coordinating agile sprints across clinical teams, delivering EHR implementations with 95 per cent schedule adherence has taught her something that policy papers often miss: the devil isn’t just in the details; it’s in getting diverse groups to agree on what the details even are.

Her recent work on the Maine Island Resiliency App, a mobile solution integrating predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) for isolated coastal communities, isn’t just professional credential-building; it’s ground-level research into precisely the coordination challenges her article examines. She’s writing about islands because she’s been working to protect them.

What makes Abaneme’s perspective particularly valuable is her international experience. With degrees from universities in Nigeria, Ireland and the United States, and professional experience spanning three continents, she brings a genuinely global view to a global problem. When she writes about climate disasters affecting 46 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa or drought vulnerability in Kenya, these aren’t abstract statistics; they’re contexts she understands from having navigated professional environments across radically different governance structures and cultural frameworks.

Her observation about stakeholders speaking ‘’different languages literally and figuratively’’ isn’t metaphorical handwriting; it’s the hard-won insight of someone who has had to translate technical requirements for clinical teams in Ireland, coordinate with IT departments across American state lines, and manage vendor relationships across cultural boundaries.

Innocent Anoruo is a Lagos-based media practitioner.