Margaret McKenzie

Managing Director

Margaret is the managing director of Urban Earth. Margaret has a BSc Honours in Computer Science and an MSc Degree in Environment and Development. She has over twenty years of experience consulting in the climate change, energy, and sustainability fields, and is an experienced facilitator, strategic advisor, and project manager. 

Margaret has led several projects to help organisations such as municipalities, hotels and care facilities to reduce their energy consumption and has developed several energy management strategies.  A key focus of her work over the last few years has been working on the long-running Municipal Energy Management System programme that supports a cohort of 13 municipalities to reduce their own internal energy consumption. Through this project, Margaret has been involved in developing energy management strategies, improving energy management data systems, completing energy audits of large facilities, and identifying and supporting the implementation of energy interventions.  Margaret has also been involved in several projects to develop energy management training materials and guidelines.  She has also facilitated numerous training events on energy management. 

Margaret has a special interest in leveraging computing and online tools to facilitate sustainability efforts and led the project to develop an online registration system for appliances under minimum energy performance standards in South Africa as well as the project to develop an online application platform for small-scale embedded energy generation systems.

Some of the other sustainability projects she has worked on include:  Reviewing the key policies of the City of Tshwane to ensure that they align with their climate action plan, leading the development of several online training courses on climate change and climate finance, leading a project to develop GHG inventories and updated climate change strategies for four provinces in South Africa, and providing project management support to the implementation of the 100 Resilient Cities Programme in Durban.