Climate Center Director Selected As Biden Administration Advisor
Philip B. Duffy, president and executive director of the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, was recently appointed to serve as senior climate advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology, Policy Climate and Environment Division in Washington, DC.
“For me, it’s an astonishing opportunity,” Dr. Duffy said. “Mainly because of the unprecedented scale of ambition that the Biden-Harris administration has on this issue. It’s a critical moment to address this issue. Time is running out.”
The year-long appointment is the second time that Dr. Duffy has been selected to serve in a White House advisory role on climate science and policy. He previously served as senior policy analyst and senior advisor in the US Global Change Research Program, both under the Obama-Biden administration.
“I arrived just about exactly 10 years ago, in September 2011,” Dr. Duffy said of his time serving under the Obama-Biden administration. “Things were different then. The political landscape was different, but mainly I think—and maybe these two things are related—the immediacy of climate change is so much greater now than it was then. These seemingly endless climate-related disasters have really put the issue at the forefront and made it clear that this is an issue of today, not of the future.”
Climate and Environment Division is a new entity within the Office of Science and Technology Policy created under the Biden-Harris administration.
Dr. Duffy joins the division at a critical time, following the recently published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, which points to the urgent need for greater global action on climate change, and ahead of the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties in November.
Dr. Duffy has focused much of his 30-year career on understanding the socioeconomic consequences of climate change, and applying that understanding to societal decisions and policies.
During his one-year appointment to the Climate and Environment Division, Dr. Duffy will be stepping away from his duties at Woodwell Climate Research Center. While at Woodwell, he spearheaded partnerships with various groups—Indigenous populations, social justice organizations, under-resourced municipalities, conservation organizations, asset managers, and other leaders in the private sector of business and finance—in order to understand how the many risks of climate change affect their lives, work and wellness, now and in the future, and how to manage or mitigate those risks.
“It’s a difficult challenge,” Dr. Duffy said. “Essentially it involves bridging the gap between academic sciences or the research world and the world of decision-makers. And there’s a lot of challenges involved in that. One of them is reaching the underserved and under-resourced communities and individuals. Those folks tend to experience the greatest impacts, they tend to have the least resources for managing it and they need the most help. So they require disproportionate attention.”
Dr. Duffy was founding director of the University of California’s Institute for Research on Climate Change and served as chief scientist at Climate Central, an organization that brings scientists and journalists together to better educate the public on climate change. He also worked as a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. During his time there in the 1990s and 2000s, Dr. Duffy worked with state officials in California on climate issues including drought, water scarcity, and wildfire, all of which have recently emerged as significant and detrimental environmental and societal challenges in that region.