Kathy Baughman McLeod
Senior Vice President, Atlantic Council; Director, Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center
With a mission to build individual and community resilience to climate impacts, Kathy Baughman McLeod leads the Arsht-Rock Center’s work to reach one billion people worldwide with climate resilience solutions by 2030. She also chairs the Center’s Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance — which is helping to appoint Chief Heat Officers in cities throughout the world, spearheading the global push to name and categorize heat waves, and accelerating urban financing approaches to reducing the effects of heat. Previously, she served as Global Executive for Environmental and Social Risk at Bank of America, Managing Director for Climate Resilience at The Nature Conservancy, and was Deputy Chief of Staff to Florida's elected Chief Financial Officer, where she also served as an appointed member of the Florida Climate and Energy Commission. Baughman McLeod is the recipient of the Fuqua School of Business 2021 “Leader of Consequence” award, a Policy Fellow of the French Foreign Ministry, and was appointed to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Advisory Council as its first-ever climate specialist in 2021. She holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and an MS in Geography from Florida State University.
