Sheila Foster

Sheila R. Foster is Professor of Climate at Columbia University and an Affiliated Faculty
Member at Columbia Law School.

Previously, she was the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Urban Law and Policy at
Georgetown University and before that a Distinguished University Professor and Albert
A. Walsh Professor of Real Estate, Land Use, and Property Law at Fordham University.

Foster is well known for her articles and books on environmental and climate justice,
land use, local government, and urban policy. They include From the Ground Up:
Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (with Luke
Cole) and The Law of Environmental Justice (with Michael Gerrard). She has been
recognized as one of the leading scholars in the environmental law field by the
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s Academy of Environmental
Law, with its 2018 Senior Scholarship Award, and the American College of
Environmental Lawyers (ACOEL), which recently elected her as a fellow.

Throughout her career, Foster has worked with local governments, federal agencies, and
public officials on a range of urban, environmental, and climate issues. She helped to
launch the Global Parliament of Mayors and was the chair of its advisory committee from
2017-2020, and she has been a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change
since 2016 serving as co-chair of its workgroup on climate equity. Foster is co-editor and
a founding Advisory Board member of the Journal of Climate Resilience & Climate
Justice.

In addition, Foster co-directs LabGov, an applied research laboratory that pioneered the
award-winning Co-City approach that has been applied in different cities, helping to
create more collaborative and community-oriented solutions for a range of urban
challenges. The Co-City approach is set forth in her award-winning MIT Press book, Co-
Cities: Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities (with
Christian Iaione).