Daphne Wysham

Daphne Wysham is a Fellow in CSE's Climate Justice Program. A former Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., where she worked for 20 years, Daphne has worked since the mid-1990s on strategic research and advocacy at the intersection of climate justice and sustainable economies.

Her path-breaking research and advocacy has resulted in shifts in public policy and investment at the national and international level. A campaign she helped launch in 1997, taking on the World Bank's role in financing fossil fuels, achieved a major victory when the World Bank stopped all new lending for coal plants globally in 2010 and agreed to phase out all upstream fossil fuel financing by 2019. 

A campaign she helped launch in Portland, OR, put in place the strongest ordinance of its kind in the country, calling for an end to all new fossil fuel infrastructure. In the aftermath of Portland's initiative, Daphne organized civil society groups, mayors and other elected officials in the U.S. and Canada to endorse and pledge to uphold a similar platform for no new fossil fuel infrastructure in their jurisdictions.

With John Talberth, CSE's President, she worked to get a new policy CSE pioneered, now being piloted in Multnomah County, OR and King County, WA, “fossil fuel risk bonds,” to be endorsed by elected officials — both state and federal elected officials and presidential candidates in the 2020 election.

Her writings, commentary and analysis have appeared in national news publications and on radio and TV, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Grist, The Guardian, The Nation, The Financial Times, The Huffington Post and on Al Jazeera, Democracy Now!, MSNBC, BBC, NPR, and Marketplace, among others. For 8 years, from 2003-2011, she hosted Earthbeat Radio and TV, which focused on the politics of climate change and other environmental issues and was aired on over 60 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.

A graduate of Princeton University, Daphne is a co-founder of the Durban Group for Climate Justice, co-founder of Climate Justice Now!, a contributing researcher for Naomi Klein's bestselling book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs the Climate,” and serves on the board of the following organizations: Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth-Nigeria; Climate Protection and Restoration Initiative.