A conversation with Buro Happold’s new U.S. Head of Climate & Resilience, Shelby Buso

A new chapter for Buro Happold’s resilience work begins with a leader shaped by policy, equity, and on‑the‑ground city experience.

As climate pressures intensify and cities wrestle with the rising costs of inaction, Buro Happold has tapped Shelby Buso to lead its U.S. Climate & Resilience practice – a role that sits at the intersection of policy, infrastructure, equity, and long-term planning.

Buso, who has held senior sustainability roles in Atlanta, Miami, and San Diego, brings a policymaker’s eye, a strategist’s discipline, and a community advocate’s instinct. As she settles into her new role, Shelby spoke with us about what drew her to Buro Happold, the shifting landscape of resilience in the U.S., and what she believes the next five years will demand from cities, institutions, and practitioners.

You’re stepping into this role at a pivotal moment for climate and resilience in the U.S. What experiences most shape how you approach this field today?

It always feels like a pivotal moment for climate – either because momentum is high or because support is lacking. In my own path, I’ve approached this work from multiple angles: law, policy, nonprofit advocacy, and city leadership. I studied anthropology and environmental studies in undergrad, which led me to ask bigger questions about why our systems look the way they do and how culture shapes environmental outcomes.

Law school helped me understand the structures that drive those systems – why policies exist, who they serve, and how they evolve. I’ve always been drawn to that blend of structure and creativity. Laws reflect our values as communities and changing them is often the most direct route to impact.

Working in cities sharpened that focus. In Atlanta, where I served as the inaugural Chief Sustainability Officer, we were nested within the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, so everything we did was explicitly tied to community benefit. In Miami, the work centered on infrastructure and operationalizing resilience. In San Diego, it was pure mitigation: reducing emissions as quickly as possible. Those three perspectives taught me that “climate” means very different things depending on the place and the people.

From your vantage point, what are the most urgent (and perhaps under-recognized) resilience challenges facing U.S. cities and institutions?

Every city is different, and that’s part of the challenge. We can’t show up with a template. We need to listen first.

But across the board, the biggest barriers I see are implementation and funding. Cities are great at writing plans; there are plans upon plans in every jurisdiction. What’s harder is turning them into action – particularly when internal teams are stretched thin and the business case for climate action isn’t fully built out.

That’s where outside partners can help: not just to design strategies, but to justify them, fund them, and analyze their long-term value.

As you begin leading climate and resilience work at Buro Happold, what is your vision for the practice?

I see us evolving into a truly A-to-Z partner – not just writing plans, but helping clients organize, finance, and evaluate the work. That full-spectrum support is what helps cities move faster.

To deliver that, we need deep, ongoing relationships. When I worked inside city government, the best partners were the ones who already understood our context – how the city worked, what the community cared about, the history behind policies. Every hour I didn’t have to spend explaining those things was time saved for implementation.

We have an opportunity to build those long-term relationships here.

How do you plan to collaborate across Buro Happold to deliver integrated solutions? And how does Buro Happold serve clients as a true end‑to‑end partner?

What excites me most about Buro Happold is that we’re not a firm where advisory lives in one corner and engineering lives in another – we’re built to bridge every step of the journey.

Internally, that means treating climate, resilience, equity, and justice as lenses that overlay every discipline, not as isolated specialties. The climate team doesn’t have to be in every meeting because we can cultivate ambassadors across planning, engineering, infrastructure, economics, and sustainability who understand when and how to bring us in. That creates a shared vocabulary and shared responsibility.

For clients, this translates into something powerful: a single partner who can move a project from vision -> strategy -> funding -> design -> implementation -> impact measurement.

Whether a city needs a resilience strategy, a climate budget, a community engagement plan, a decarbonization roadmap, an infrastructure concept, or a feasibility analysis, they don’t have to assemble a piecemeal team across multiple firms. We can advise them at the policy level, help them build the business case, translate that into technical pathways, engineer the solutions, and quantify the benefits. That’s what cities need right now. Time is short. Capacity is thin. And the challenges are too interconnected for siloed solutions. The more we function as a unified team, the more we can shorten the distance between an idea and build a resilient, community‑centered reality.

We’re not just a firm that writes a plan – we can help organize the work, justify the work, finance it, and then analyze the outcomes.

Shelby Buso
U.S. Head of Climate & Resilience

More cities are shifting from compliance-based planning toward long-term resilience strategies. What does that evolution mean for clients? And how do you help them think beyond short-term risk?

Clients increasingly want to move past the bare minimum. They’re facing complex, interconnected challenges, and their responses need to be equally tailored. Thankfully, we now have both positive case studies and cautionary tales; clear evidence of the cost of inaction.

Our job is to translate that evidence into motivation and momentum. That means expanding the conversation from “What’s the immediate risk?” to “What is the long-term value for your community, economy, and infrastructure?” Resilience isn’t just protection – it’s value creation.

How do you embed climate justice into your work in a way that is meaningful and actionable?

Equity isn’t an “add‑on” in climate planning anymore, it’s the foundation. For me, embedding climate justice means ensuring that lived experience carries as much weight as technical expertise. When municipalities genuinely share power with their communities, the work gains authenticity and accountability.

I’ve seen the strongest outcomes when cities treat residents as co‑designers, not stakeholders to check off. Climate plans only succeed when they reflect the actual conditions people experience every day. And communities have to be able to see themselves in the proposed solutions, or adoption simply won’t happen.

I don’t rely on one singular framework, because no two communities are the same. But the principle is always consistent: an equitable plan is one whose benefits land where they’re needed most, and whose implementation is shaped by the people most affected.

What innovations or shifts in thinking will define the next era of climate resilience?

Climate budgeting is going to be huge. Budget offices, finance teams, and accountants have not traditionally been part of climate conversations, but they must be. Cities and institutions have set ambitious climate deadlines, and the window for action is narrowing. We need to help clients bake climate considerations into financial decision-making so the work can actually get funded.

“I’m lucky to have found work that motivates me every day. Yes, there’s a lot of fearmongering out there, but there’s also extraordinary innovation – ideas I never could have imagined. I get to see those ideas up close, and that keeps me hopeful.”

If you had to predict: what will resilience practice look like five years from now?

Ideally, more consistent and more regional. Cities often get siloed within their own boundaries, but those boundaries are imaginary lines. Climate impacts cross them; our solutions should too. I see resilience becoming more interconnected, collaborative, and globally informed. And Buro Happold’s international reach gives us a powerful platform to support that shift.