Hannah Safford is Associate Director of Climate and Environment at the Federation of American Scientists. She most recently served as Director for Transportation & Resilience at the White House Climate Policy Office, where she managed key pillars of the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic climate agenda. Hannah’s work and commentary has been featured on MSNBC and Al Jazeera, as well as in Nature, PNAS, and others. Hannah holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, as well as an MPA in Public and International Affairs, an M.Eng in Environmental Engineering and Water Resources, and a B.S.E. in Chemical and Biological Engineering, all from Princeton University.
As the efficacy of environmental laws has waned, so has their durability. What was once a broadly shared goal – protecting Americans from environmental harm – is now a political football, with rules that whipsaw back and forth depending on who’s in charge.
Extreme heat has become a national economic crisis: lowering productivity, shrinking business revenue, destroying crops, and pushing power grids to the brink. The impacts of extreme heat cost our Nation an estimated $162 billion in 2024 – equivalent to nearly 1% of the U.S. GDP.
Until a month ago, I was an event skeptic. When it’s as easy as a Zoom link to connect with colleagues, I found it hard to believe that getting a bunch of people together around an agenda was ever really worth the time and effort. Point one for my colleagues at FAS and the White […]
Question: What do family game nights and federal government initiatives have in common? Answer: They’re both much easier to successfully start than to successfully finish. Coordinating multiple stakeholders—each with their unique interests and perspectives—around a common goal is simply difficult. At FAS, we have yet to figure out how to best tackle family game nights. But we […]
With millions of new scientific papers published every year, acting on research insights presents a formidable challenge. But what if evidence could “live”?
The hundreds of millions of dollars that the IRA invests in environmental-data collection and analysis will serve as critical scaffolding to efficiently guide federal spending on environmental initiatives in the near future.