Joyce Coffee

Biography: Joyce Coffee, LEED AP, founder and President of Climate Resilience Consulting, is an accomplished organizational strategist and visionary leader with over 20 years of domestic and international experience in the corporate, government and non-profit sectors implementing resilience and sustainability strategies, management systems, performance measurement, partnerships, benchmarking and reporting. Her career started working on private sector projects in Southeast Asia for USAID’s US-Asia Environmental Partnership and the World Bank and proceeded with implementing water security projects for MWH, a global engineering company; creating community sustainability projects for a niche architecture and urban design firm, Farr Associates; and pioneering public private partnerships, adaptation planning, interdepartmental coordination and climate performance measurement as lead of the Chicago Climate Action Plan at the City of Chicago. More recently, she created corporate social responsibility plans and reports for Fortune 500 companies as a Vice President at Edelman and ran a preeminent global adaptation nonprofit grounded in university-based research and analytics, the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, ND-GAIN. Joyce is a Senior Sustainability Fellow at the Global Institute of Sustainability and advises various high level resilience groups, including the Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment work group, the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, the Resilience Brokers Programme, The USGBC Illinois Chapter, the Anthropocene Alliance and the National Science Foundation’s Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network. She is a Chicago Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leader. She was a founding board member of the Alliance for Water Efficiency, a Great Lakes delegate to Brookings International Young Leaders Climate Change Summit, a member of Illinois FARM’s advisory group and an Aspen Institute Socrates Fellow. She received a B.S. in biology, environmental studies and Asian studies from Tufts University and a Masters in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of the Climate Adaptation Exchange Blog. @joycecoffee