About CBI: Staff & Board

Lynn Scarlett is a Visiting Scholar at Resources for the Future working on issues pertaining to climate change, ecosystem services, and landscape-scale conservation. She was named the Zurich Financial Services visiting lecturer at the University of California, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management in October 2009.

From 2005 to January 2009, she served as the Deputy Secretary and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Department of the Interior, a post she took on after 4 years as the Department's Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget. She served as Acting Secretary of the Department for two months in 2006. Ms. Scarlett initiated Interior’s Cooperative Conservation Task Force in 2002. The Task Force, comprising all 8 of Interior’s bureaus, focused on building Interior Department capacity to engage in collaborative partnerships in landscape-scale and cross-boundary conservation. Scarlett also chaired the Department's Climate Change Task Force. She is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Scarlett serves on the board of the American Hiking Society, the Continental Divide Trail Alliance, and the nonprofit environmental mediation organization RESOLVE. She is a trustee emeritus of the Udall Foundation. A recent publication is “Large Landscape Conservation,” co-authored with Matt McKinney and Dan Kemmis, published by the Lincoln Institute in June 2010. She received her B.A. and M.A. in political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also completed her Ph.D. coursework and exams in political science.