Last week, Dena joined the Sabin Center as our 2017-2019 Climate Law Fellow. Dena’s work at the Sabin Center will focus on developing legal and regulatory tools to advance the efforts of governments and private actors to adapt to a changing climate and to mitigate the effects of climate change. She is particularly interested in cultivating solutions that can work cohesively across jurisdictional scales.
Before starting at the Sabin Center, Dena completed a J.D. at Yale Law School and a Masters of Environmental Management at Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. While at Yale, Dena worked with the Yale Climate Change Dialogue and City of Paris to expand global action on climate change by designing legal mechanisms that could link climate change action commitments from cities, regional governments, and corporate actors to the international treaty regime. She has previously completed legal internships at the Environmental Defense Fund, Earthjustice, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
Dena first became passionate about advancing climate change policy as an undergraduate conducting aerial and backcountry surveys to measure the effects of climate change on vulnerable species in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. As she photo-documented the unprecedented outbreak of mountain pine beetle devastating the region due to warming temperatures, she grew increasingly alarmed by the impacts of climate change on the most remote and wild corners of our planet. Witnessing how that data helped support litigation to relist the grizzly bear to the Endangered Species Act, she began a joint J.D./M.E.M. degree at Yale to better understand how to advance legal and policy solutions that mitigate the extent and impacts of climate change.
You can reach Dena at dpa2126@columbia.edu.
