Dr. Wendy Miles specializes in the human dimensions of environmental change and biodiversity conservation. She is the Science Collaboration Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Science Applications program in the Pacific Islands.
For the past 15 years, Wendy's work has focused on climate change and conservation planning in the Indo-Pacific. She previously served as the Program Manager for the Pacific RISA program at the East-West Center, working to build adaptive capacity to climate variability and change in Hawaiʻi and the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands. From 2016-2018, she was the Adaptation Initiatives Manager for the Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative, where she coordinated climate adaptation initiatives and associated projects, consultancies, and research grants in the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Islands and Hawaiʻi. More recently she was contracted by the Department of the Interior as a Community Resilience Planner and Social-Environmental Scientist for the Resilient Hawaiian Communities Initiative, co-led by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Office of Native Hawaiian Relations, National Park Service, and University of Hawaiʻi William S. Richardson School of Law Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law. For her dissertation, Wendy investigated how the Paris Agreement’s forest carbon offsetting mechanism, REDD+, was influencing environmental governance and local livelihoods through a case study of the Indonesia-Australia Forest Carbon Partnership.
Dr. Miles has publications in the social and environmental sciences, including peer-reviewed journal articles, co-edited books, book chapters, professional reports, and newspaper commentaries. She is a former Fulbright Fellow and Environmental Protection Agency STAR Fellow. Wendy holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Hawaiʻi and an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management from the University of Oxford.
