Laura Hammett is a climate adaptation and urban resilience expert with over 15 years of experience helping governments and companies evaluate, quantify, and manage climate risks while prioritizing the role of both people and the natural environment in resilience planning. She has led strategic planning processes and climate risk and vulnerability assessments, managed complex program evaluations, and designed context-based climate adaptation solutions with a variety of public and private sector clients, including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), energy utilities, multinational companies, and several United Nations Agencies.

Laura served as the Director of Adaptation for the USAID Climate Adaptation Support Activity, advising USAID teams on use of climate information to inform risk management and scale adaptation investment. Previously she led ICF’s international adaptation and resilience market portfolio and worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Thailand to advance Green Climate Fund and Global Environment Facility-funded adaptation programming and develop National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) in countries worldwide. Earlier in her career she worked with the flood risk modeling startup Floodbase as they developed their initial product offering, piloting an engagement methodology to connect cloud-based risk information with ground-level decision makers.

Though she works across sectors, Ms. Hammett has expertise in urban climate adaptation, adaptation finance, resilience measurement and monitoring, and the integration of disaster and climate risk management. She has worked with over 50 countries and authored articles and technical reports on a variety of climate adaptation and urban resilience topics. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the Yale School of the Environment and a certification in adaptation finance from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management.