Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Marisa O. Ensor is a gender, children, and youth specialist with a background in the human dimensions of environmental change (including climate change), disasters, conflict, displacement, security, development, and humanitarian action. She has conducted fieldwork in over 20 conflict-affected and environmentally fragile countries of Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America, and has authored five books and numerous articles and policy-oriented reports on the experiences of women, children, and youth affected by environmental disasters, conflict, insecurity, and displacement. Trained in applied environmental and legal anthropology and human rights law, Ensor holds a Ph.D. from the University of Florida, a master’s degree in law from the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and a graduate certificate in refugee and forced migration studies from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. She is currently based at Georgetown University’s Program on Justice and Peace. She is also an affiliate faculty and former senior fellow at Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration in the School of Foreign Service.  Ensor was a 2022-2023 Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues research fellow,  and directed a study of the intergenerational transmission of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as a climate change adaptation strategy; the Climate-TEK Kids Project initially focused on Mesoamerica, with fieldwork conducted in Honduras and Guatemala as inception case studies.