Erica Bower

Erica Bower is a Researcher on Climate Displacement in the Environment and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Erica has extensive experience working in human rights, climate adaptation, and human mobility.  She has prior experience working with relocating communities in the Philippines and Nepal and has advised the governments of Fiji and the United States on rights-based, culturally sensitive relocation planning. She is also finishing her PhD on the governance of community-wide planned relocations at Stanford University and is a member of the Platform on Disaster Displacement (PDD) Advisory Committee. 

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) and has conducted research on similar themes for a range of organizations, including OxFam, the Mary Robinson Foundation, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and the Nansen Initiative. She holds 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.