Liz Tully

Program Officer, Climate Smart Communities Initiative
Washington, D.C.

Liz has more than 15 years of work experience monitoring, and resourcing community-led conservation projects around the world and throughout the US. Prior to joining the Climate Resilience Fund, Liz was the Director of the WCS Climate Adaptation Fund (CAF), a multimillion-dollar regranting program. Over 8 years, Liz managed CAF’s grantmaking and programmatic priorities as they evolved from piloting innovative and novel demonstrations of climate-adapted conservation at the site level, to catalyzing a field of practice in adaptation, to supporting grant partners to mainstream adaptation approaches. Liz previously served as a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Officer at the United Nations Foundation (UNF) where she managed a framework tying actions to program strategy and tracking progress towards impact goals. Prior to joining UNF, Liz worked at Rare tracking and monitoring the progress and quality of all of Rare’s world-wide conservation projects through centralized reporting tools, global standards and indicators of impact and conducting periodic site evaluations.

Liz also worked at the World Resources Institute (WRI) piloting a new scoring system to evaluate conservation project proposals seeking funding from USDA-NRCS. Liz has conducted field research with the Center for Tropical Agriculture Research (CATIE) studying the impact of payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs on local dairy farms and ecosystems in Costa Rica, and with Cornell University where she studied with the indigenous Kayapo community of Gorotire to learn from their sustainable management of non-timber forest products on protected land.

Liz earned a Master’s degree in International Affairs from American University and a Master’s degree in Natural Resources Management and Sustainable Development from the United Nations University for Peace & Conflict Studies. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Conservation Biology from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.