Fonna Forman is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego and Founding Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice, a research center launched in 2010 to advance high-impact, community-based research on poverty, migration, and climate disruption, with a focus on the US–Mexico borderlands. The Center’s core initiative is the UCSD Community Stations — a network of neighborhood-based platforms on both sides of the border-wall dedicated to co-developing climate adaptation infrastructure, emergency and social housing, public space, environmental conservancy, and experimental cultural strategies that foster binational civic engagement and collective climate action. Among these projects is Santuario Frontera, the largest migrant shelter in the US–Mexico border region and a prototype for integrated humanitarian and ecological resilience infrastructure.
Forman and long-time research partner, architect Teddy Cruz, recently received the 2026 US National Design Award for the UCSD Community Stations—the nation’s highest recognition for design excellence, overseen by the Smithsonian — in the category of Climate Action.
Forman’s research advances bottom-up approaches to climate resilience planning in frontline communities, with particular attention to climate-forced displacement, cross-border ecological governance, and emerging forms of citizenship shaped by shared environmental risks and opportunities. Across her work, she investigates how universities can function as civic partners in advancing equitable climate adaptation and strengthening public capacity for collective action under conditions of accelerating disruption.
Forman is a climate action leader across the University of California system. She was appointed in 2021 by UC President Michael Drake to serve as co-chair of the UC Global Climate Leadership Council (GCLC), an executive-level body advising the Office of the President on systemwide climate policy, research, and education. She is the first faculty member to serve in this role.
She has served on numerous national and international advisory bodies on human rights, climate justice, migration and equitable urbanization. Since 2017, Forman has contributed to the work of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences on the ethical and societal dimensions of climate change, migration, and resilience through lectures, publications, and participation in major Vatican convenings on planetary health, humanitarian migration, and climate justice. From 2013 to 2017 she was appointed by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to the Global Citizenship Commission, a Carnegie-funded initiative advising United Nations policy on human rights in the 21st century.
Forman has contributed to major climate policy reports and initiatives with the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, the Well Under 2 Degrees initiative, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the California Collaborative for Climate Change Solutions. She is presently an advisor on California’s 5th Climate Change Assessment; and in 2015 she served as vice-chair, with Ramanathan, of the University of California’s influential Bending the Curve report on climate solutions, carried by Governor Jerry Brown to the COP-21 meetings in Paris.
A leading advocate of climate education as public infrastructure for resilience, Forman serves as faculty PI of Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions, a systemwide educational platform used across all ten University of California campuses and adopted by universities and professional institutions nationally and internationally, including the American Medical Association, the One Health Workforce Alliance, the National Education Opportunity Network, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. At UC San Diego she led the committee that established the university’s Climate Change Education Requirement in 2023, the first such requirement in California and among the first in the world. She recently published a commentary in Nature on the importance of localizing climate education.
