I grew up in the American West, in northern Nevada. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my entire childhood in the ’90s took place in drought conditions. The threat of fire was ever-present in the summer. My family once had to evacuate when a brush fire got dangerously close to our home. Still, as a kid, I had yet to connect the persistent dryness of the area to the larger climate crisis.
That changed when I got to college. When I took environmental policy classes there, I also began to understand the injustices at the heart of a lot of natural resource management. One class on international water policy really struck a chord—it focused on how corporations were privatizing resources, profiting from what should have been freely available to local communities.
Like any 20-year-old in college, I was ticked off. The social justice aspect of climate change sank in even further in grad school, where I studied environmental management. I spent a summer in Nepal researching the ability of local communities to respond to profound changes in climate. As with so many places in the world, the people there were suffering the worst consequences, even though their contribution to emissions was negligible.
Seeing up close just how little capacity those isolated farmers had to deal with new weather extremes left a profound impression. Figuring out how to plan for and respond to the impacts of climate change around the world has been central to my work at WWF since day one. Early on, I focused on training and capacity building, working to translate climate science—often technical and overcomplicated—into something that’s a little easier for people to use. In turn, I apply lessons from that work to using science to influence policy at local, national, and global levels.
Currently, a lot of my focus is on changing how infrastructure is planned and developed in the context of a worsening climate and increasing nature loss. For example, when a road is being planned between two points, not only is the intact habitat along the roadway disrupted, but the surrounding areas can become deforested and eventually urbanized or converted to agriculture. I look at infrastructure planning through a more holistic lens—one that takes into account the benefits these ecosystems provide for people.
