Karen Florini @ Chautauqua Institution

Karen Florini is a strategic advisor with C-Change Conversations, which educate audiences throughout the country about how climate change will impact them personally, why there is urgency to address it and how to forge consensus for action. She also serves as a senior fellow with the Climate Democracy Initiative.

Previously, she held multiple leadership roles at Climate Central, a non-profit climate science research and communication organization that creates highly localized information on climate impacts and solutions. In 2024 with the Council on Foreign Relations, Florini completed a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center for her project on Disenfranchised by Climate Change, which examines impacts of extreme weather on electoral processes around the globe.

Prior to joining Climate Central in 2017, Florini served as deputy special envoy for climate change at the State Department for the final two years of the Obama Administration. She led the Department’s engagement with businesses, state and local governments, and civil society in the climate negotiations context. She also headed the State Department’s portfolio on short-lived climate pollutants such as methane and black carbon. Previously, she spent more than two decades at the Environmental Defense Fund, working both on environmental health and climate change.

She earned a J.D. at Harvard, where she was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Environmental Law Review.