Sarah Henly-Shepard, is a humanitarian, climate resilience, and nature-based solutions practitioner with over 25 years of experience working alongside communities facing overlapping climate, environmental, and humanitarian crises. Trained in public health and environmental social sciences, she works at the interface of disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, and ecological design to support more just, locally led, and nature-positive, climate-smart solutions.

As Founder and Principal of Disaster Resilience LLC and Co-Founder and Co-Director of Aid Forward LLC, Sarah partners with donor institutions, local to national government agencies, NGOs, UN entities, networks, and civil society on strategies that center the rights, knowledge, and priorities of people most affected by crisis—while also recognizing ecosystems as critical partners in resilience. Since 2020, she founded and has co-led the IUCN FEBA Nature-based Solutions in Humanitarian Action Working Group, helping to build a global community of practice that bridges conservation, climate, and humanitarian actors.

Sarah spearheaded and co-authored Sphere’s Nature-based Solutions in Humanitarian Contexts Unpacked Guide, advancing practical guidance on how to integrate NbS into humanitarian standards and programming. She is also actively engaged in other networks that connect environment, climate, conflict, and peacebuilding practice and policy. She is well-published in these sectors in both peer-reviewed and gray literature, practical guidance and policy.

As a Fellow of United Edge, trained in their Justice Based Approach (JBA), Sarah brings a strong environmental ethics and social justice, decolonial, and power-aware lens to her work. JBA principles shape how she supports partners to question and transform the systems, norms, and incentives that reproduce vulnerability and inequality in humanitarian and climate action.

Her practice is grounded in community-led interdisciplinary approaches: co-designing tools, learning processes, and decision-making spaces that make room for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other historically marginalized voices. She has supported programs across urban and rural contexts, small islands, and coastal and forest landscapes, in diverse contexts and humanitarian settlements, helping partners navigate the tensions and opportunities between urgent humanitarian needs and climate and environmental resilience safeguarding and justice.

Sarah is passionate about connecting different but interrelated groups—community organizations, NGOs, networks, donors, researchers, design professionals, and movements—to maximize collaboration, resource sharing, and collective impact while reducing competition, duplication, and inefficiencies. She is particularly interested in how landscape-scale thinking—watersheds, coastlines, urban green systems—can reframe humanitarian interventions from temporary fixes toward regenerative, multi-benefit investments in people, place, culture, and livelihoods.

Alongside advisory work, Sarah designs and facilitates cross-cultural learning on topics such as climate- and conflict-sensitive programming, community-driven disaster risk reduction, justice-based and rights-based approaches, and practical applications of NbS in fragile and crisis-affected settings. She is committed to futures thinking and systems change in the aid sector, asking how humanitarian action can move beyond “doing less harm” to actively repairing relationships within and between people and the planet.

Now based in Costa Rica with her two children, Sarah is focused on building bridges between frontline communities, humanitarian actors, environmental stewards, and landscape and design professionals to imagine and realise safer, more dignified, and more ecologically grounded futures.