Laureline Simon

Care taker, Change agent, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Idea generator, Parent, Social entrepreneur, Writer/Editor

Laureline is the founder and director of One Resilient Earth, a non-profit organisation based in Bonn, Germany, and New York City, USA. One Resilient Earth raises awareness about the multifacted impacts of climate change, including on our emotional and mental health, and empowers individuals to grow their own resilience so that they can regenerate communities and ecosystems in a climate altered wold. One Resilient Earth is a learning community exploring and experimenting together through arts, science, ancient wisdom and new technologies. Laureline has been working on climate change mitigation and adaptation at the international level since 2006. She started her career with the Indian NGO SEWA, with post-disaster reconstruction projects in the Kutch desert and in informal settlements of the city of Ahmedabad. With the French Development Agency, she was in charge of project identification for large climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation programmes in India, before leading an international research programme on climate change adaptation in cities of Sub-Saharan Africa. At the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, she coordinated knowledge management and stakeholder engagement for climate change adaptation, supported the setting up of the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples’ platform, assisted a task force on population displacements related to climate change, and coordinated Resilience Frontiers, an inter-UN agencies collective intelligence process on long-term resilience. Laureline believes that responding to the climate emergency requires a cultural transformation that starts at the individual level but involves the support of a community. She sees inner resilience as an ability to constantly learn, adapt and transform, so as to regenerate onself, our communities and our ecosystems. She advocates for a better understanding of the role of personal and collective trauma in the current climate crisis, including in limiting our ability to connect, imagine and innovate. She draws joy and inspiration from nature and her two children, who help her daily take better care of the Earth.

If we could feel love and connecteness early on in our lives, we would have far less work around climate change and environmental dedradation today.

arts, inner work, mindset change, regeneration, resilience, trauma

Catching stray spiders, snakes, lizards, toads... with my bare hands.