Rebecca Scheurer

Rebecca Scheurer is the director of Humanitarian Initiatives at the Adrienne Arsht - Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. She is a humanitarian professional with over twenty years of international disaster management experience in more than twenty-five countries, managing budgets totaling more than $200 million. She served in a variety of leadership roles in major disaster responses such as Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina, earthquakes in Haiti and Pakistan, and during the southeast Asia tsunami of 2004. 

Before the Atlantic Council, Scheurer lead efforts at The Nature Conservancy to foster resilience in vulnerable communities using ecosystem-based strategies for risk reduction. She offers expertise in community-based disaster preparedness and is particularly interested in seeking innovative solutions for managing risks associated with climate change, migration and environmental degradation. 

Scheurer previously served as the founding director of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Global Disaster Preparedness Center which aims to build local level disaster preparedness capacities worldwide. Other positions held at American Red Cross include regional representative for Asia based in Bangkok, Thailand, and country representative in Hanoi, Vietnam. Scheurer also worked for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance under the US Agency for International Development, last serving as Regional Advisor for South Asia based in Kathmandu, Nepal.