Janesse Brewer, Senior Associate, Center for Science and Public Policy

Janesse Brewer convenes, facilitates and mediates dialogue and negotiation aimed at resolving public policy issues. Janesse focuses on multi-party national and international disputes to find sustainable solutions to complex problems with difficult timelines. She specializes in health, environmental and emerging technology issues.

Presently, she is facilitating a Restoration Advisory Board, comprised primarily of Native American representatives from the local villages on a remote island in the Bering Sea, to address clean-up issues related to former federal defense facilities in their communities, with particular emphasis on the impact on their subsistence lifestyle.

Janesse facilitates DuPont’s Biotechnology Advisory Panel which seeks guidance from a diverse, international group of experts in ethics, sustainability, subsistence farming, consumer health advocacy, and nutrition. She and a Keystone team are working to find sustainable solutions to a mining dispute in Papua New Guinea involving 50,000 indigenous people whose traditional ways of life have been forever altered by the mine tailings emptied into the Ok Tedi river basin. Janesse has spent four months on the ground and traveled up and down the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers to help bring leaders from 152 villages into the decision-making process. Her work with the women and children affected by the mine has resulted in establishing a Women and Children’s Trust Fund that will direct 10% of the final settlement to programming specifically for women and children. Funding priorities and spending will be decided by women and by those representing children’s interests.

Janesse has many years’ experience facilitating dialogue and finding solutions to complex environmental issues, many of which involve NEPA. She facilitated dialogue focused on finding safe and publicly acceptable methods of chemical weapons destruction in Colorado and Kentucky. She has worked with NASA and the launch site community in Florida regarding risk to the environmental and population in the event of a launch accident involving a spacecraft with nuclear components. She has facilitated workshops among the Navy, scientists, and Congressional staffers on low frequency sonar’s effect on marine mammals.