She is also Executive Director of the Waterloo Climate Institute, a Lead Author of the United Nations’ Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and helped to lead expert input into the development of Canada’s first National Adaptation Strategy.

Her research uncovers transformative responses to climate change at the community scale, the political and justice dimensions of energy transitions, and the unique contributions that small businesses can make to this solving these complex challenges. She leads the international partnership-based research project TRANSFORM: Accelerating sustainability entrepreneurship experiments in local spaces, and is the Director of the Sustainability Policy Research on Urban Transformations (SPROUT) Lab.

Sarah Burch’s current projects include: Sustainability Governance: Triggering transformative innovation in communities (University of Waterloo, University of East Anglia, Erasmus University Rotterdam); Accelerating community-based climate change adaptation in developing countries (University of Waterloo and ICLEI Canada); and The climate change imperative: Changing current development paths (Royal Roads University, University of British Columbia, University of Waterloo, Simon Fraser University). She has contributed articles to journals including Global Environmental Change, Climate Policy, Environmental Science & Policy, Energy Policy, Sustainable Development and Futures.

She holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford. She was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars in 2017, one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40TM in 2018, and one of Canada’s Clean 50 in 2021.