Towards Equitable Carbon Action: Community Benefits and Environmental Justice

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  Aissa Dearing Reparative Land Collective Program Advisor @ Sustain Our Future Foundation

  Aissa Dearing is the Reparative Land Collective Program Advisor at Sustain Our Future Foundation, where she guides the foundation’s visionary work at the intersection of land liberation, climate repair, and community sovereignty. In this role, Aissa stewards a Collective of historically underserved land stewards across the U.S. committed to Land ReMatriation. Together, the Collective weaves ancestral land practices with contemporary ecological strategies to restore biodiversity, draw carbon from the atmosphere, and reclaim the sacred relationship between people and place. Beyond the foundation, Aissa is a PhD Candidate at the University of Oxford's School of Geography and the Environment, exploring decolonial integrations into carbon removal strategies and technologies. Aissa holds a B.A. in History and B.S. in Environmental Science from Howard University and an M.S. in Environmental Change and Management from University of Oxford, supported by the Marshall and Clarendon Scholarships.

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  Ugbaad Kosar Director of Environmental Justice @ Carbon180

  Ugbaad Kosar leads Carbon180’s environmental justice program, ensuring equity and justice are embedded across the organization's work. She spends her time working with community groups, innovation circles, and policymakers to explore equitable, just, and highly accountable carbon removal scale up. Ugbaad holds a dual MS in forest sciences and renewable resource management from the University of Alberta and the University of Freiburg and a BS from Carleton University.

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  Lauren Gifford, PhD Interim Director, Soil Carbon Solutions Center, @ Colorado State University

  Lauren Gifford, PhD is a critical geographer exploring intersections of climate change policy, conservation, markets and justice. Her work asks how, and by whom, carbon is quantified, standardized and commodified for carbon removal and nature-based climate interventions. She has particular expertise in carbon markets and offsets, climate finance, climate tech, UNFCCC processes, and climate and environmental justice. Dr. Gifford is Interim Director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University, where she founded the Carbon Finance Bootcamp, and is faculty in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability. She is also a science advisor at Carbon Direct.

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  Grant Gutierrez, PhD Senior Climate Justice Strategist @ Carbon Direct

  Dr. Grant Gutierrez draws on his multidisciplinary background to lead climate justice analysis, policy and strategy development at Carbon Direct to ensure more just environmental futures for generations to come. Dr. Gutierrez is an applied environmental & climate justice expert, drawing on work across community-based research, public policy, and direct climate advocacy. Trained as a political ecologist, he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with climate justice movements in Chile, rural northern California, and the Puget Sound on topics of watershed conservation and Indigenous sovereignty, renewable energy development, superfund remediation, and floodplain restoration. Alongside his work at Carbon Direct, he is affiliate faculty at the School of Environmental & Forest Sciences at the University of Washington, where he teaches and conducts research on the environmental justice dimensions of climate change adaptation.