Kayly Ober

Kayly Ober is a visiting scholar with the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work focuses on data, modeling, and innovative technologies to help policymakers understand the implications of climate mobility and to design and implement better policies to address it. She is also currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Prior to joining Carnegie, she served as the first-ever senior climate security advisor at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, where she helped design the Department’s climate security strategy and coordinated the data analytics workstream for the U.S. Climate Mobility Plan of Action. She previously was the senior program officer for climate, environment, and conflict at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the senior advocate and program manager of the climate displacement program at Refugees International. From 2020 to 2022, she was a member of the Task Force on Displacement under the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage. She has also held research and advisory roles with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, ODI Global, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Kayly is co-author of Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, the World Bank’s flagship report on future climate mobility, and Migration and Displacement in a Changing Climate (Cambridge University Press, 2025). She holds a BA from American University and an MSc from the London School of Economics and is completing her PhD in geography at the University of Bonn.