October 30, 2024

Advancing Climate and Sustainability Solutions Within Federal Government: Lydia Olander, White House Council on Environmental Quality

Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

This is part of a series focusing on Nicholas Institute experts who have recently taken on temporary assignments within federal entities.

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Throughout her career, Lydia Olander has worked to connect the dots between the United States’ natural resources and the value they provide to communities throughout the country.

She continued this quest during two years at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), which sits between the president and the federal agencies that execute environmental policy. The council interprets what the president’s big-picture policy goals mean for federal action and works with the agencies to get everyone moving in the same direction.

Lydia Olander
Lydia Olander
(Credit: Leigh Vogel)

As director of nature-based resilience at CEQ, Olander led projects within two different groups: the nature team that focused on land and waters and the climate resilience team. A critical part of her role was finding ways to link these efforts.

“There's a need to incorporate climate resilience and climate adaptation into how we manage nature—think about the forest of the future, for example,” said Olander, a program director at the Nicholas Institute and an adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment. “We also need to think about how we manage nature for climate resilience purposes, such as managing our floodplains and watersheds to reduce flood risk for communities.”

While continuing to work with her team at Duke part-time, Olander contributed to reports, guidance and plans at CEQ as part of the nature team.

On Earth Day 2022, President Biden issued an executive order that called for a report on addressing climate change through the use of nature-based solutions—actions to protect, sustainably manage or restore natural or modified ecosystems to address societal challenges. Olander worked with two other White House offices to produce a national roadmap for unlocking the potential of nature-based solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve community resilience to climate impacts.

Olander served as the CEQ representative on a six-person team that wrote guidance for assessing ecosystem services in benefit-cost analysis as a way to incorporate nature’s benefits into little-known but critically important evaluations of most federal policies and programs. She also represented the council during a multiagency process to develop a national plan on natural capital accounting, which, when completed, will enable an assessment of nature’s contributions to the economy.

Olander provided input on new U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ guidelines for investments in water resources projects, a policy that builds on advice she provided during five years on the Corps’ Environmental Advisory Board. The proposed rule released in February 2024 opens the door for Corps projects to better account for local priorities, incorporate nature-based or nature-enhanced alternatives and provide multiple benefits beyond simple economic considerations.

Midway through Olander’s tenure, she had the opportunity to help build a new climate resilience team at CEQ. Her work included co-leading interagency working groups on coastal resilience and climate driven relocation.

Olander was also part of the team that developed the first-ever National Climate Resilience Framework as a step toward a national climate adaptation plan. The framework establishes a vision for a climate-resilient nation and guidance for resilience-related activities and investments by the federal government and its partners.

For Olander, all these outputs—and more—tapped into skills and expertise she has honed over nearly 20 years at Duke.

“I had years of experience working on topics that were priorities for CEQ,” she said. “It was fulfilling to put that expertise to work on a variety of timely, high-priority projects.”

Several projects Olander undertook as part of the nature team built on her previous work at Duke, including efforts related to the National Ecosystem Services Partnership (NESP), a network that enhances collaboration within the ecosystem services community. On the resilience side, she was able to tap into her experience with the Resilience Roadmap, a nonpartisan, independent project hosted by the Nicholas Institute.

Beyond her specific topical expertise, Olander was also able to apply a broader skillset that’s become a hallmark of the Nicholas Institute.

“Most of the institute’s projects are co-designed and co-developed with decision-makers and stakeholders, which is very similar to the work that is happening at the White House,” she said.

Now that she’s back at Duke full-time, Olander and her team are continuing to make strategic contributions to accelerate nature-based solutions and other climate resilience efforts.

In a new nature project funded by the Doris Duke Foundation, Olander’s team with support from the National Center for Ecological Analysis & Synthesis are working with experts to co-design an approach to manage national nature data. The goal is to better enable a variety of endeavors, including natural capital accounting, tracking progress toward national goals to protect 30 percent of lands and waters by 2030, the new national nature assessment and emerging private sector nature disclosures.  

On the climate resilience side, Olander and Duke colleagues Mark Borsuk and Francis Bouchard are co-leading an emerging university-industry research center on insurance and climate resilience. In addition, she is among the faculty leaders of a summer 2024 Climate+ project and a 2024-2025 Bass Connections project engaging students in local climate resilience efforts in partnership with the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resilience.

Olander and her team have also hosted webinars with experts and federal officials through NESP and the Resilience Roadmap to improve understanding of some of the initiatives she helped develop at CEQ.

“My experience at CEQ really helped clarify where Duke and the Nicholas Institute can have the most impact as we work to accelerate progress on nature-based solutions and climate resilience,” she said.