Dr. Alison Shaw

CLIMATE SOLUTIONS

Dr. Alison Shaw is a scientist and practitioner with over 20 years’ experience in pioneering climate change and sustainability research-to-practice approaches. She was the first authorized research observer in the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process and has since been designing ways to integrate climate and sustainability strategy into policy and practice at all scales. As founder of FlipSide Sustainability, she leveraged her training as a scientist, strategist, and organizational coach to catalyze the leadership and innovation necessary to guide organizations into the new era of business consciousness.

As Executive Director of ACT – the Action on Climate Team at Simon Fraser University, Alison aims to advance pioneering research to practice approaches and partnerships. She and her team continue to mobilize low carbon resilience (LCR) approaches and nature-based solutions (NbS) to ensure that ‘climate action that multi-solves’ is mainstreamed into policy, planning, strategy, and operational decisions in the public and private sectors. Reducing climate risk and emissions not only safeguards investments, but can advance other sustainability goals such as equity, health, biodiversity, and clean economic development. Climate change is not an environmental problem but is instead a governance and design challenge. At ACT, Alison and her team work with forward-thinking partners to co-create, test, and evaluate practical and effective approaches that accelerate resilience, promote rapid decarbonization, and advance multi-solving across equity, biodiversity, and other sustainability goals, future-proofing communities, businesses, and governments and accelerating the sustainability transition.