Lydia Olander is a program director at the Nicholas Institute for Energy Environment & Sustainability and adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. She works on improving evidence-based policy and accelerating implementation of climate resilience, nature-based solutions, natural capital accounting, and environmental markets. She leads the National Ecosystem Services Partnership and sits on Duke’s Climate Commitment action team. Olander recently spent two years with the Biden administration at the Council on Environmental Quality as director of nature-based resilience and before that spent five years on the Environmental Advisory Board for the US Army Corps of Engineers.
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The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions has merged with the Duke University Energy Initiative to create a new organization: the Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability. Learn more about the merger.
The Nicholas Institute improves environmental policymaking worldwide through objective, fact-based research to confront the climate crisis, clarify the economics of limiting carbon pollution, harness emerging environmental markets, put the value of nature's benefits on the balance sheet, develop adaptive water management approaches, and identify other strategies to attain community resilience.
David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, documenting the mass extinction of Earth’s species and wild places over the course of his lifetime and shares his vision for a better future; and The Social Dilemma which dives into the originally unintended consequences of making the internet profitable that are now the fundamental structure of the internet economy and all of the social media products we use. Probably the most damaging of these unintended consequences has been intensifying deep social divides, undermining what little common truth we held as citizens that could help us build consensus and solve problems.