Mélody Braun
Senior Staff Associate
Climate Response Lead to Columbia Global Centers | Paris
Background
Mélody Braun is a Senior Staff Associate at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), seconded as Climate Response Lead to Columbia Global Centers | Paris, to help connect and expand climate engagement and partnerships between New York and France/Europe.
Mélody is a climate adaptation and risk management expert, with over a decade of experience working with practitioners, policy makers, and climate scientists to better integrate climate information into the development of climate adaptation strategies and policies in climate-sensitive sectors. Past projects she designed, led, and supported focused on adaptation, climate risk insurance, and climate services in the agriculture and aquaculture, food security, health, and humanitarian sectors.
Her work strongly centers around the development of inclusive and transdisciplinary co-production processes that support the design of systemic solutions for the most vulnerable, and that incorporate critical issues of climate justice, social equity, and sustainability.
She has been following the climate negotiations since COP15, with particular attention to adaptation, climate-smart agriculture, and loss and damage. She is most interested in connecting efforts at the local and global level—bringing expertise and lessons learned in science and practice at the local level into the UNFCCC space, and helping turn global policies into concrete local implementation.
Her skillset and roles include project design and lead, applied research, landscape analysis and vulnerability/needs assessment, participatory processes and stakeholder engagement at local to global levels, capacity building (design and delivery), partnership development, guest-teaching.