Carly Phillips

Kendall Science Fellow

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Carly Phillips is the Kendall Fellow for Protecting Carbon in Alaska’s Boreal Forests with the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Her work focuses on protecting carbon in boreal forests, specifically as wildfires increasingly threaten these ecosystems in Alaska. Dr. Phillips is leading a two-year collaboration between UCS and the Woods Hole Research Center that combines predictive modeling with economic analysis to weigh the cost of fire suppression against the social cost of large-scale carbon release. See Carly's full bio.

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Carly's Latest Posts

What do Alaska Wildfires Mean for Global Climate Change?

July 31, 2019 3:56 PM EDT

During the (on-going) 2019 fire season, over 2 million acres have burned – an area roughly equivalent to that of Yellowstone National Park. In comparison to many fires in the conterminous United States, many fires in Alaska burn far away from population centers, and as such can be fought and responded to differently. However, to put the alarming nature of this season in context, the 2019 fire season in Alaska has already burned greater acreage than ALL fires in California during 2018 (~1.8 million acres), the year of the devastating Camp, Woolsey, and Carr fires. Read more >

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How Alaska’s Recent Heat Wave May Worsen Climate Warming

July 11, 2019 12:17 PM EDT

Over the holiday weekend, three cities in Alaska experienced record heat with temperatures in Anchorage reaching 90°F. In a city where local July temperatures averaged 61°F in 2018, this extreme heat illustrates the dramatic effects of climate change in northern regions of the world. These record-breaking temperatures, however, could further intensify climate warming by priming Alaskan landscapes to release carbon and heat-trapping gases in two major ways. Read more >

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Winning at Climate Change: an Arctic and Boreal Story

June 10, 2019 3:39 PM EDT

Climate change is definitely not a competition, but if it were, arctic tundra and boreal forests would be crushing it by getting hotter and changing faster than the rest of the world. Read more >

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Photo: BLM Alaska Fire Service

The Vicious Climate-Wildfire Cycle

April 30, 2019 4:17 PM EDT

We have the knowledge and skills to break the cycle. Will we? Read more >

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Maps Lie. Beyoncé Doesn’t

March 19, 2019 1:47 PM EDT

To fully appreciate how maps inform our understanding of Earth’s most basic geography, we need to project an image of known dimensions… Read more >

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