Lauretta Burke is a Senior Associate in the Food, Forest and Water Program of the World Resources Institute. Lauretta has led WRI’s coastal ecosystem team since 2001, which focuses on producing high-quality analyses and tools to improve management and foster resilience in coastal ecosystems. She leads both the Reefs at Risk project, which uses GIS spatial analysis to evaluate local and climate-related threats to coral reefs, and the Coastal Capital project, which uses economic valuation to evaluate and communicate the goods and services that coastal ecosystems provide to people. She is the lead author of the 2011 global analysis of threats to reefs, Reefs at Risk Revisited.
Prior to joining WRI, Lauretta implemented a geographic information system (GIS) in Guyana to support urban infrastructure rehabilitation planning; managed integrated GIS database development and training projects, primarily focused on Africa; established a GIS for the Environmental Studies program of the Central European University; and performed analysis on the impact of potential climate change on fisheries, wetlands and biological diversity for U.S. EPA’s Global Climate Change Program.
Lauretta holds a Master’s in Geography from University of California at Santa Barbara, a Master’s in Environment and Resource Policy from the George Washington University and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York.