About Us
What’s in a Name?
Rivers create oxbow lakes through adaptation—responding to changing landscapes by finding new courses.
Disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation require the same kind of transformation: understanding how risk is created and forging new paths that reduce harm. Oxbow helps organizations adapt like rivers do—changing course when needed to build resilience in a rapidly shifting world.
Founder and Director
Sara Walsh, PhD
Sara Walsh brings something rare to climate and disaster risk work: genuine fluency across research, policy, and field practice. Over 15 years she has worked at every level of the system — from national policy development to community-level program integration — across Canada, West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region, and Asia, with a particular emphasis on disaster recovery and mainstreaming DRR and climate adaptation into programs that have to work under pressure.
Her career has focused on the political and institutional dynamics of disaster risk management: not just what good policy looks like, but why it’s so hard to implement, and how to change that. She is among the first generation of disaster risk professionals to have pursued the field from undergraduate to doctoral level, earning her PhD (Northumbria University, UK 2017) for research on the political dynamics of mainstreaming DRR policy through the Government of Nepal. Her interests span governance reform, social vulnerability, and gender equity — and she brings the same commitment to honest analysis to every project Oxbow takes on.
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If you’re facing a mandated requirement, a time-sensitive post-event review, or a strategy that needs to move from planning to action—Oxbow can help.