Abby Hall is a policy analyst with the US EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities in Washington, DC. Hall has worked at EPA for more than five years, where she started out with the Office of Water doing policy research on innovative cities across the country that were using green infrastructure to build better communities and improve water quality. As a result of her research, Hall has published a number of national guidebooks, case study reports, and tools to help communities build green infrastructure. She now focuses on a broader range of land use and development issues at EPA, and works with federal agency partners, states, cities, and tribes.

Hall manages two key programs that provide technical assistance to communities across the nation: EPA’s Smart Growth Implementation Assistance Program, which focuses on complex policy issues, and the Greening America’s Capitals program, which provides design assistance to state capital cities. Through these programs and others at EPA, Hall has been able to travel to and work with communities from Boston, Massachusetts to Spirit Lake Nation, North Dakota.

Hall also works on issues of climate change adaptation and received an Urban and Regional Policy Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund to study adaptation and land use planning in three European cities: Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Lyon, France; and Barcelona, Spain. She has incorporated the lessons learned from these cities into her work at the federal level and in direct assistance to states and local governments that are trying to plan for climate change while and make near-term improvement to their communities. Hall also links her climate adaptation work to a partnership between EPA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that focuses on disaster planning. She works to include consideration of smart growth principles and climate change in planning for and recovery from disasters. Through pilot projects, training, and ongoing partnership work with FEMA, Hall and her colleagues at EPA are able to link the fields of hazard mitigation, land use planning, and climate change adaptation for greater community benefit.

Hall earned a Master’s degree in Anthropology from Stanford University with a focus on land use, population change, and environmental policy.