Kelly Leilani Main is the Executive Director of Buy-In Community Planning, an organization providing equitable and accessible relocation services for communities on the frontlines of irreversible climate impacts. Kelly has worked as a planner, designer, and geospatial analyst at the intersection of climate adaptation planning and rights-driven relocation policy in contexts diverse as the Philippines, Turkey, Ghana, Uganda, Peru, Nepal, Lebanon, Palestine, and the US. Kelly has a Masters in City Planning from the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and is currently a PhD student of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley.

Kelly’s work on climate-adaptive urban planning has been presented widely, including at the IPCC Conference on Cities (2018), International Conference on Building Resilience (2018), At What Point Managed Retreat? (2021, 2019), New Cities Higher Ground (2020), National Adaptation Forum (2022), and MIT Design X Fast Forward Symposium (2021), and published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences (2021), Enhancing Disaster Preparedness (Elsevier, 2020) the Journal of Architectural Education (2019), Planning Theory and Practice (2020), and Landscape Architecture Frontiers (2019).