Katie Pofahl

Katie Pofahl is the Eastern Washington Community Relations Manager with the Climate Resilient Forests and Communities team at The Nature Conservancy. Katie is based in the Central Cascades and her role focuses on working with local communities, partners and leaders to plan, design, and implement projects that reflect a broad-suite of community needs, such as climate resilience, habitat conservation, forest health, recreation, economic development, and health and safety.

Katie has a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of the Environment and over ten years of experience in applied conservation. She is a Switzer Fellow, a Wyss Scholar for the Conservation of the American West, and she led the Yale Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration. Katie is focused on enacting transformative land conservation strategies that enable communities in the American West to respond to urgent threats from drought, fire, urban sprawl and climate change. A key aspect of Katie's approach is to view communities as a solution to critical issues rather than as a problem. Her work increases the pace and scale of land conservation while improving the wellbeing of our communities by using proven approaches that link land conservation to economic vitality, health, justice, and resilience to climate change.

At Yale, Katie worked with the Center for Business and the Environment educating land conservation practitioners about cutting-edge strategies for project finance. Katie also worked with The Nature Conservancy's Sierra Nevada program to develop policy approaches that reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California while supporting a sustainable forest products industry and collaborated with the Rural West Covid Project where she worked to inform public policy across various levels of government to meet the needs of rural West communities struggling with the social and economic impacts of the pandemic.

Before coming to Yale, Katie worked for a land trust in Central California developing innovative community programs that were featured by the Land Trust Alliance and recognized by California State Parks for excellence in collaboration. She also served in public office with the Monterey Peninsula Regional Park and District protecting 1,041 acres of habitat from development, including rare forests and working ranchlands, and securing $1.2 million annually for open space preservation.

In her free time, Katie loves bike touring, surfing, snowboarding, gardening, and walking slowly in the forest. She also loves spending time with her husband and dogs in the mountains, meadows, and coastlines of the the Western US.