Experts & Staff

Ruth Greenspan Bell is a Senior Fellow in the Climate & Energy Program at World Resources Institute (WRI).

In her most recent assignment, she worked intensively in Poland since July 2007 (and living in Warsaw from July through mid-December 2008), first to establish the conditions under which the Polish Foreign Ministry appointed a Climate Ambassador in the preparations for the Polish hosting of COP 14 in Poznan; and later to build and manage a Polish Task Force to support the work of the Ambassador. The members of the Task Force (young Poles) were eventually integrated into the official Polish Delegation for the purpose of the COP. Bell is currently working to convert the Task Force into a much-needed independent Polish Climate Policy Shop/Think Tank.

Prior to joining WRI, Bell directed International Institutional Development and Environmental Assistance (IIDEA) at Resources for the Future, a program that helped build more effective systems of environmental protection globally. In her last U.S. Government assignment, Bell was Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, and, before that, in various domestic management positions in U.S. EPA’s Office of General Counsel. Bell has worked in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet bloc, and Asia (notably India and China) on a wide variety of environmental compliance, policy and enforcement issues, on environmental public participation, and increasingly on realistic ways to manage climate change in those difficult venues. She lead a highly acclaimed study of the policy process and changes that led to improvements in air quality in Delhi, the most important being the switch of all commercial vehicles from petrol and diesel to CNG.

Bell publishes extensively about the environmental issues connected with the political and economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, ways to stimulate better implementation of domestic environmental requirements in the developing world and the countries in transition, and international environmental requirements particularly climate change, addressing a wide range of policy and environmental audiences (Foreign Affairs, Issues in Science and Technology, Environment and Harvard International Review among them) to share and examine big new ideas. The purpose of this publishing effort has been to impact policy and to seek innovative solutions to long-standing vexing problems. A full publication list can be provided.

Bell is a graduate of UCLA and the School of Law of the University of California at Berkeley; a member of several boards (examples include Environmental Alliance, 2020Vision, the Mountain Institute and the Alumni Board of her law school); and a long-standing member of the Council on Foreign Relations.