Shana Tabak is senior fellow and director of the Climate Mobility Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Shana is an attorney and scholar with expertise in global migration, climate change, international law, and human rights. Her research examines the relationship between climate change and its impact on human habitability as well as displacement. In addition to her role at Carnegie, she teaches at Georgetown Law (Washington, DC) and Sciences Po (Paris) and is an affiliated scholar with Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration.

Shana has a breadth of experience across philanthropy, civil society, business, international organizations, and academia.  While her research seeks to explain how climate change is reshaping habitability, she leverages this expertise to drive solutions that uplift people-centered climate action through informed and effective cross-sector collaborations.  Most recently, she led climate migration at Emerson Collective, where she developed a widely adopted strategic framework on climate migration, catalyzed policy engagement, and steered philanthropic investments.   

Shana’s work at the intersection of climate change and human mobility builds on her established expertise in migration, refugee law, and international law.  She has taught at law schools and human rights clinics both in the United States and in Latin America, where she directed human rights advocacy and strategic litigation before UN tribunals and U.S. courts.  Shana also served as Founding Executive Director of the Tahirih Justice Center Atlanta, where she established a nonprofit that remains a leading voice on immigrant rights, detention, and asylum litigation.

She is the author of numerous law review articles and book chapters, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Reuters, CNN, HBO, NPR, and El País, among others.

Tabak holds a JD from Georgetown University with a Certificate in Refugees and Humanitarian Emergencies, an LLM from George Washington University, and a BA (summa cum laude) from Macalester College. She clerked at the International Court of Justice and researched migration and foreign policy in Bolivia as a Fulbright Scholar. A list of her publications is available here.