Erica Bower

Dr. Erica Bower is a Researcher on Climate Displacement in the Environment and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Erica has over a decade of experience researching how climate change affects human mobility patterns and advocating for policies that better protect people’s rights on the move. Her primary focus is a unique form of climate mobility: community-driven planned relocation. She has worked with relocating communities in Panama, the Philippines and Nepal and has advised the governments of Fiji and the United States on rights-respecting, culturally sensitive relocation planning. She is also a member of the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) Advisory Committee.

Her work at Human Rights Watch builds on her PhD research on the governance and outcomes of climate-related community-wide planned relocations. She has published on these themes in Nature Climate Change and Forced Migration Review, among other peer-reviewed journals, and is the lead author of a global mapping of over 400 disaster-related planned relocation cases.

She previously worked on climate displacement in the Protection Policy and Legal Advice section of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). She has conducted research on similar themes for a range of organizations, including National Geographic, OxFam, the Mary Robinson Foundation, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and the Nansen Initiative.

She holds a PhD in planned relocation governance from Stanford University, a MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Human Rights and Sustainable Development from Columbia University.