Dr. Cara Augustenborg

Dr. Cara Augustenborg is an environmental scientist by training and a media pundit by passion, awarded the title of “Woman of Influence” at the Irish Women’s Awards in 2020. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Landscape Studies and Environmental Policy at University College Dublin; member of Ireland’s Climate Change Advisory Council; and a member of the President of Ireland’s Council of State.

She also hosted the national environmental radio show and podcast “Down to Earth” on Newstalk and serves on the advisory committee of Teagasc’s agri-environmental Signpost programme.

Cara is a former Chairperson of both Friends of the Earth Europe and Friends of the Earth Ireland and a former Government appointee to the advisory committee for Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency and the National Dialogue on Climate Action.

She was the first person in Ireland to join Al Gore’s Climate Reality Programme in 2013. Her blog, The Verdant Yank, was awarded Ireland’s best political and current affairs blog in 2016. In 2016, the Sunday Independent named Cara as one of the 20 most influential people to lead the low carbon transition in Ireland and GreenNews.ie called her one of five women in Ireland making incalculable contributions to Irish environmental issues.

Her blog, ‘The Verdant Yank’ gives her take on “green” issues from an Irish-American perspective and was awarded Ireland’s best political and current affairs blog in 2016. Cara conducted her doctoral research at Ireland’s Agriculture and Food Research Authority, Teagasc, and was the Irish Ambassador for Ben & Jerry’s Climate Change College, traveling to the Arctic with the late Marc Cornelissen in 2008 to witness the impacts of climate change first-hand.

Cara was educated in the United States but her mother is from Co. Kerry, Ireland. She is therefore a dual citizen of Ireland and the USA. Cara was born in Germany while her father was stationed there as a fighter pilot for the U.S. Air Force. Following their time in Germany, her family moved to Pennsylvania, Saudi Arabia, New Orleans, and finally Washington State -where Cara graduated from Hanford High School. Hanford is historically famous as the location where the plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in World War II was produced.

Today, Hanford is the world’s largest nuclear clean up operation. Growing up near Hanford Nuclear Reservation had a profound effect on Cara’s interest in environmental issue