AMPLIFY SPOTLIGHT: SARAH SIELOFF
Human societies across the developed world share a focus on economic growth. This focus drives our economy, politics, and now, the pace of climate change. I want to use AMPLIFY to launch a conversation that challenges how we think and talk about growth locally, and connects these discussions to global climate change discourse.
This work builds on the research, thinking, and communication I started as a CFR-Hitachi Fellow in 2020, researching how Japanese cities and towns are approaching population decline. During my time in Japan, I observed that many municipalities are continuing to pursue status quo economic development strategies, despite evidence that in the coming decades, Japan’s population (already the oldest on earth) will continue to age and decline. Many Japanese municipalities need new approaches to economic development, but at an applied level, those are slow in coming.
In 30 years, Japan’s population transition will be even more advanced, and will require correspondingly new approaches to local economic development. Meanwhile, at the global level, we have less than 30 years to get to zero emissions in order to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change. This requires a critical assessment of our beliefs about economic growth, but as with Japan’s municipalities, we struggle to make the leap from concept to application.
Climate change forces us to re-examine our beliefs about growth, down to our language: common usage of “development,” for example, connotes continued growth. A Zen Buddhist priest in Japan, for example, told me that the term “sustainable development” communicates that we can live sustainably without having to give anything up.
Through AMPLIFY, my goal is to critically examine assumptions about growth in local approaches to climate change, and add new dimensions to sustainability discussions at the local, state, and federal levels.
Sarah Sieloff is a 2022 AMPLIFY Fellow.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
Sarah Sieloff works primarily with local governments and nonprofits to support community planning processes, as well as economic and community development. Her expertise includes policy analysis and public funding and finance. Environmental justice, climate change mitigation, and climate adaptation are central to her work.
Sarah spent 2020 and part of 2021 as a Council on Foreign Relations-Hitachi Fellow in Japan, where she researched municipal responses to depopulation. From 2015 to 2020, she served as the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Creative Land Recycling. In this capacity, Sarah helped communities from Puerto Rico to Alaska clean up and redevelop contaminated land. Sarah’s work experience also includes nearly four years in federal service, which she entered as a Presidential Management Fellow, and during which she served as the Memphis team lead for the White House Council on Strong Cities, Strong Communities.
Sarah has worked across the United States and internationally, including in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific, and has published at Bloomberg CityLab, Urban Land Online, the East-West Center, and Tokyo Review. She holds a Master of Public Affairs from Princeton University and a B.A. from Eckerd College, and is a Truman Scholar. Sarah has been a Pacific Council member since 2016, and speaks fluent Spanish, passable French, and bad but slowly improving Japanese.
The Pacific Council on International Policy launched AMPLIFY in February 2022 as a leadership development program that provides learning and networking opportunities to early to mid-career professionals who have traditionally been underrepresented in foreign affairs. Through AMPLIFY, the Pacific Council aims to cultivate local-to-global leaders, strengthen diversity in foreign policy, and be an accelerator for local-to-global initiatives from the western United States.
UPDATED: AUGUST 2022