Kelly Levin

Kelly Levin
Senior Associate, Climate & Energy Program
klevin@wri.org|+1 (202) 729-7910

Kelly Levin is a senior associate with WRI’s major emerging economies objective. She leads WRI’s Measurement and Performance Tracking Project, which builds capacity in developing countries to create and enhance systems that track emissions and emissions reductions associated with climate and energy policies and low-carbon development goals.

She closely follows the negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and analyzes related emission reduction targets and actions, as well as accounting rules for calculating emissions reductions. She has conducted an annual review of climate change science for WRI since 2005. Kelly is also the Research Director of the 2010-2011 World Resources Report, which is dedicated to climate change adaptation, and specifically to how national-level governments can improve decision making in a changing climate.

She pursued her doctoral work at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where her research focused on adaptation policies to contend with climate change impacts to biodiversity. Kelly was a writer for the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) Reporting Services, covering biodiversity and climate change meetings, including the UN climate change negotiations. Kelly has also worked as a climate policy/technical analyst at NESCAUM (Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management), where she devoted her time to developing a regional greenhouse gas registry in the Northeast and assisting states in the development of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Kelly holds a PhD and Master of Environmental Management from Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a B.A. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale College.

Kelly has been awarded the Google Climate Science Communication Fellowship and the Academic Council on the United Nations System Dissertation Award, and is a Switzer Fellow, Teresa Heinz Scholar, and Udall Scholar. Kelly participants in National Science Foundation grant review activities, and her publications can be found in Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, International Forestry Review, among other journals.

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Latest Post

Submitted on May 1, 2012
Many people have wrestled with how best to convey the latest scientific research on climate change. Here’s your chance to help us figure out the answer. Last summer I was selected as a Google Science Communication Fellow and had the opportunity to explore this topic. Now, we are launching a pilot project that aims to assess whether video can be a compelling way for a climate scientist to...

More Blog Posts

Submitted on April 2, 2012
In recent years, several developing countries, with support from donor agencies, have begun to seriously consider Low Emissions Development Strategies (LEDS), country-driven plans that enable the...
Submitted on February 13, 2012
The Durban climate deal reached in December 2011 marked an important milestone in the design of a system to measure, report, and verify (MRV) countries’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and their...
Submitted on February 13, 2012
The UNFCCC’s ultimate goal is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a “level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” Thus, the...
Submitted on February 8, 2012
Punxsutawney Phil may have forecast six more weeks of winter, but for much of the country winter has not yet arrived. Once again, weird weather is dominating the headlines. Temperatures have recently...
Submitted on November 18, 2011
The world must brace for more extreme weather. That is the clear message from a new report that finds climate change is likely to bring more record-breaking temperatures, heat waves, and heavy...
Submitted on November 4, 2011
East Coast snowstorms in October. The suburbs of Bangkok under water. Extreme droughts in the Horn of Africa. Such “freak” weather events have dominated headlines for over a year, and...
Submitted on November 2, 2011
This piece originally appeared on the Bangkok Post website. A third of Thailand is under water. Epic floods have taken people’s lives, destroyed businesses and crops, and are now sweeping into...
Submitted on October 24, 2011
Climate skeptics have denounced studies of temperature rise because of alleged biases in data sets. So in an effort to get to the bottom of these critiques, a group of scientists launched the...
Submitted on October 19, 2011
This post originally appeared in the National Journal Energy & Environment Expert Blog. The question was, “The summer of 2011 marked the second-lowest ice coverage on record for the Arctic...
Submitted on October 12, 2011
Today, WRI releases Climate Science 2009-2010, the latest installment in our periodic review of the state of play of the science of climate change. Co-authors Kelly Levin and Dennis Tirpak describe...
Submitted on September 15, 2011
This post was written with James Anderson, Communications Coordinator at the World Resources Institute. “This is unprecedented fire behavior. We’ve never seen conditions like this before. Not a...