Dr. Erica Bower is currently the Climate Displacement Researcher at Human Rights Watch and the Co-facilitator of the Coalition on Dignified Climate Relocation. For over a decade, she has researched how climate change affects human mobility patterns and advocated for policies that better protect people’s rights on the move. Her primary focus is a unique form of climate mobility: community-driven planned relocation. She has worked with relocating communities in Panama, Senegal, and Solomon Islands and has advised governments including Fiji on rights-respecting, culturally sensitive relocation planning. She was the lead author of a global mapping of over 400 disaster-related planned relocation cases, and her research has been published in peer reviewed journals such as Nature Climate Change, Global Environmental Change and Climate Policy, and covered by global media outlets such as the Guardian, Al Jazeera, NPR, and the BBC.
Erica is also a member of the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) Advisory Committee and an affiliate of the Kaldor Centre at the University of New South Wales. She previously was a technical expert on climate mobility at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and has conducted research on similar themes for National Geographic, OxFam, the Mary Robinson Foundation, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and the Nansen Initiative. She holds a PhD in planned relocation governance from Stanford University, a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Human Rights and Sustainable Development from Columbia University.
