Phoebe Barnard
Designation: Chief Executive Officer, Stable Planet Alliance and Affiliate Full Professor, University of Washington
Expertise: Societal and environmental futures; climate and ecosystem restoration; youth leadership collaboration; species vulnerability to environmental and climate change.
Phoebe is a passionate champion of agency and positive societal change in distressingly turbulent times. Core coauthor of World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency (2020) and lead author of World Scientists’ Warnings into Action: Local to Global (2021), she is focused on accelerating and aligning global action towards a regenerative future and a kinder, wiser, humbler civilization. Phoebe is now based in the USA as founding CEO of the Stable Planet Alliance, a global coalition of organizations and people working to bend the curve on human planetary impact; affiliate full professor of the University of Washington; and honorary research associate of the ACDI and FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology at UCT.
Phoebe has worked on diverse sustainability and biodiversity issues, large and small -- from ecoregional and national biodiversity and climate change strategic planning, policy and implementation, and the global status and trends of ecosystems and their ability to support human health, livelihoods and wellbeing (on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment board), to ecological vulnerability and adaptation studies on endemic species of the fynbos biome (while based at SANBI and UCT). Phoebe now concentrates on policy change, human behaviour change and media, including filmmaking, as a way to hasten humanity’s degrowth and mindset shift, and to get as many species as possible to get through the gauntlet of the next few hundred years of dangerous climate change.