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Cynthia Scharf

Senior Fellow – Climate Interventions

New York

Cynthia is an internationally recognized thinker, writer, and speaker on geoengineering and climate interventions. She is a former senior member of UN Secretary-General’s climate change team.

Cynthia Scharf is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Future Generations, steering our work on climate intervention technologies and briefing senior climate officials in the EU and globally on the need to develop international guardrails and guidelines for solar geoengineering.

Prior to this, she served for seven years as the senior strategy director for the Carnegie Climate Governance (C2G) Initiative, which focused on governance for geoengineering and large-scale carbon removals.

Cynthia has published articles on these topics in Foreign Policy, Science, and Fortune Magazine, among others. She’s addressed audiences at the Vatican, World Bank, Arctic Circle Assembly, Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia, American Geophysical Union, Natural History Museum in NY, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S.

Cynthia previously served as the head of strategic communications and chief speechwriter on climate change for United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon from 2009-2016. She supported and advised the Secretary-General during the UNFCCC negotiations, including the landmark Paris climate change agreement in 2015.

She received her M.A. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and serves on the advisory group of Climate Interactive and SRM360. She was also a fellow at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and served on the board of GreenFaith, a multi-faith climate organization.