Joel Clement is an Arctic Initiative Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs with a background in climate and energy issues, resilience and climate change adaptation, landscape-scale conservation and management, and Arctic social-ecological systems. Prior to joining the Kennedy School, Mr. Clement served as an executive for seven years at the U.S. Department of the Interior. In September 2017, he was awarded The Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage and resigned from public service in October of that year. Since then he has received multiple awards for ethics, courage, and his dedication to the role of science in public policy. He has been featured and interviewed on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, ABC, NBC, CBS, and Democracy Now and has been published by the Washington Post, Denver Post, the Guardian, and NBCThink.

Before serving in the federal Government, Mr. Clement was the Conservation Science Program Officer for a private foundation where he focused on climate-change adaptation strategies, landscape-scale conservation, and improving geospatial data-sharing capacity. In addition to his role at the Harvard Kennedy School, he is an Associate with the Stockholm Environment Institute and a Senior Fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists, where he works to expose political interference in science and promote public understanding of the importance of independent science in policymaking.