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 reductions associated with low-carbon development goals. She closely follows the negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and analyzes related emissions reduction targets and actions. Kelly has conducted an annual review of climate change science for WRI since 2005. She was also the Research Director and lead author of the 2010-2011 World Resources Report, which was dedicated to climate change adaptation, and specifically to how governments can improve decision making in a changing climate.

Kelly pursued her doctoral work at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where her research focused on adaptation policies to contend with climate impacts to biodiversity. During her PhD studies, she was also 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. She 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’s publications can be found in Climate Policy, Global Environmental Politics, the Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, International Forestry Review, Policy Sciences, among other journals.

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Latest Post

Submitted on March 6, 2013
After a year of extreme weather events and recent studies outlining climate change’s impacts, it’s become increasingly clear that we must understand what emissions reduction pathways are necessary to avoid these risks. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) last Assessment Report, for example, outlined the emissions reductions needed from developed countries to stabilize...

More Blog Posts

Submitted on January 17, 2013
Temperatures hit an unseasonably warm 61˚F in Washington D.C. earlier this week. The Middle East is blanketed in record rainfall and rare heavy snowfall, ending a nearly decade-long drought....
Submitted on January 15, 2013
The draft U.S. National Climate Assessment was released last week, confirming that the climate is changing, that it is primarily due to human activities, and that the United States is already being...
Submitted on September 6, 2012
Over the past several months, extreme weather and climate events in the form of heat waves, droughts, fires, and flooding have seemed to become the norm rather than the exception. In the past half-...
Submitted on July 24, 2012
This post is part of WRI’s “Extreme Weather Watch” series, which explores the link between climate change and extreme events. Read our other posts in this series. Heat and drought...
Submitted on July 16, 2012
This post is part of WRI’s “Extreme Weather Watch” series, which explores the link between climate change and extreme events. Read our other posts in this series. Many people are...
Submitted on July 6, 2012
This post is part of WRI’s “Extreme Weather Watch” series, which explores the link between climate change and extreme events. Read our other posts in this series. While many...
Submitted on June 14, 2012
We are happy to announce the results of the project that we launched in May to assess how recent climate science discoveries can be most effectively communicated via video. In just one month, we...
Submitted on June 5, 2012
Last week we passed an unfortunate marker when it comes to climate change: concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere have hit 400 parts per million (ppm) near the Arctic. What Does...
Submitted on June 1, 2012
In early May, we invited participants to vote for their favorite video method for communicating recent climate science findings. The survey is now complete. More than 1,500 votes were cast, and we...
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...
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...