Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

Multisolving: One action, many benefits

Elizabeth Sawin is Founder and Director of the Multisolving Institute and an expert on solutions that address climate change while also improving health, well-being, equity, and economic vitality. She developed the idea of ‘multisolving’ to help people see and create conditions for such win-win-win solutions. Beth writes and speaks about multisolving, climate change, and leadership based on systems thinking to local, national, and international audiences. Her work has been published in Non-Profit Quarterly, The Stanford Social Innovation ReviewU. S. NewsThe Daily Climate, System Dynamics Review, and more. Her work has been covered  in TimeForbesThe Washington Post as well. In 2010, Beth Co-Founded Climate Interactive, which she co-directed until 2021.

While at Climate Interactive, she led the scientific team that offered the first assessment  of the sufficiency of country pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and was a contributing author of the first UNEP Emissions Gap Report. Beth also led Climate Interactive’s efforts to integrate measures of equity, health and well-being into decision support tools and computer simulations.

She has trained and mentored global sustainability leaders in the Donella Meadows Fellows Program and provided systems thinking training to both Ashoka and Dalai Lama Fellows. Since 2014, Beth has participated in the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, a continuing dialogue on issues of climate change and sustainability among a select group of humanities scholars, writers, artists, and climate scientists. Beth is also a member of the advisory board to the Kresge Foundation’s Climate Change Health and Equity Program. A biologist with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Beth trained in system dynamics and sustainability with Donella Meadows and worked at Sustainability Institute, the research institute founded by Meadows, for 13 years. Beth has two adult daughters and lives in rural Vermont where she and her husband grow as much of their own food as they can manage.

You can follow Beth on Mastodon