Mona Shomali

Mona Shomali is an adjunct instructor of the International Affairs graduate program at the New School. She is also adjunct faculty  for the Global Affairs Department at NYU. Her areas of specialty are: environmental and human rights conflicts in the South American Amazon rainforest, and the geo-politics of climate change related natural disasters.. Mona graduated with a Bachelors degree in Environmental Studies from U.C. Santa Cruz and a Masters degree in Global Affairs from New York University. Most recently, Mona has served as an environmental policy analyst for Islands First, an NGO that lobbies the U.N. of behalf of small islands that face the threat of extinction due to climate change/sea level rise. Besides policy work, Mona has worked for the private sector as an environmental consultant, contributed to World Bank reports as a climate change/ecology researcher, and has served in a regulatory government capacity at the California Coastal Commission.

Mona has worked in the NGO sector for approximately 15 years. She first started as a community organizer working with an Environmental Scientist at Communities for a Better Environment in Oakland, California - in a campaign to hold refineries accountable for chemical leaks in low income neighborhoods. Under the guise of International NGO field work, she has supervised an environmental/sanitation project in the Northeast interior of Brazil in collaboration with the state health ministry, Fundacao Nacional De Saude. In 2006 Mona joined an Ecuador- based NGO, the Center for Economic and Social Rights to work on the landmark case of the Sarayacu Indigenous peoples vs. the State of Ecuador, filed in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. As a part of her field work in the Amazon basin, Mona conducted interviews, policy research, and presented her findings at Inter-tribal meetings and Indigenous Rights workshops. The majority of her research was based on International Norms and legal precedents involving government sanctioned sub-soil resource exploitation on ancestral indigenous lands- more specifically-the right to "Prior Consultation/Previous Consent". Her original research findings were acknowledged in a Spanish language publication titled "Prior Consent: Petroleum and the Environment in the Ecuadorian Amazon." Mona also speaks 5 languages, which include Farsi, Spanish and Portuguese.


66 West 12th St Office 620
1 (212) 206 3524

monashomali@hotmail.com
in Spring 2012 will be teaching