Adam Markham

Adam Markham is deputy director of the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He helps lead UCS efforts to persuade policymakers to rapidly and effectively respond to the climate crisis, focusing particularly on climate impacts to national parks, protected areas, and cultural heritage. In 2014 he co-authored the UCS report National Landmarks at Risk, which detailed climate impacts on US historic and archaeological sites. In 2016, he was the lead author for a UNESCO/UNEP/UCS report, World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate, which helped bring global attention to the threat of climate change to World Heritage sites.

Before joining UCS, Markham was president of Clean Air-Cool Planet, a climate solutions-focused nongovernmental organization, and previously directed the international climate campaign for the World Wildlife Fund, leading the organization’s international climate team at the 1997 Kyoto Conference. With the WWF, he also coordinated reviews of climate impacts on US national parks, marine ecosystems, and migratory birds, in addition to undertaking climate vulnerability assessments in China and southern Africa.

Mr. Markham serves as a member of the climate change strategies and archaeological resources committee of the Society for American Archaeology, as a member of the world commission on protected areas with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and as a board member of the US committee of the International Committee on Monuments and Sites.

Born in New Zealand and brought up in the UK, Mr. Markham earned a BSc in zoology from the University of Wales at Swansea. He has given testimony to the US Senate, and the UK and European parliaments, and his work on climate has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Antiquity, Climate Research, Climatic Change, Conservation Biology in Practice, and Trends in Ecology and Evolution. He has written, contributed chapters to, and edited several books, including A Brief History of Pollution and Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Tropical Forest Ecosystems.

Mr. Markham has also contributed articles to the Boston Globe, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, New Scientist, and Yale 360. He has been interviewed by ABC News, the BBC, CNN, and Sky News, and has been cited by the Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor, Guardian, Reuters, The New York Times, Washington Post, and many other outlets.