Meet the ECO team: Marissa Aho, AICP

Aho has what she calls a “3000-foot view” of King County’s climate work across departments and in the Executive Climate Office (ECO), and spends her days working to remove barriers and find opportunities to expand the impact of that work. She also serves as an ambassador of sorts to regional and national partners, and brings extensive past experience in urban planning, community development, and climate resilience to the role. Read a full Q&A with Marissa – including details about her first role out of college and what she’s most proud of from her time at King County so far, here:

Describe your work as King County’s “Climate Director”.
The King County Climate Director gets a 3000-foot view of all of the amazing climate work that King County is leading-- and gets to assist an amazing team by identifying barriers and opportunities and eliminating those barriers or taking advantage of those opportunities.

I also serve as a sort of ambassador of our work to local and national partners, being able to show off 20+ years of climate work that the County has done, and then thinking strategically and opportunistically about sort of the resources and experts that we're going to need to move this work forward.

It’s been a busy two years since you joined King County in 2023, with the start of King County’s first Executive Climate Office – ECO. What are you most proud of in terms of King County’s approach to climate action?
That we’re still doing it! King County has had, for a while, a foundation for our climate work that many other communities are still fighting to get. We have a Strategic Climate Action Plan that was just approved that we are mandated to update every five years; most communities don’t have that. We have climate cost-share funding that helps support our enterprise-wide and community climate work, and it serves as a shared opportunity to move the work forward. We have foundational structures that government needs for this climate work to be sustainable, and in order for it go beyond one administration or a passion project of someone who deeply cares about climate work.

What was your path to this work?
My training is as an urban planner focused on community and social development, and my work after undergrad was in youth development, so the work this office has been doing lately engaging young people in climate work has a special place in my heart. As a young person I was leading young people in doing political work, and how to invest in community projects that could impact their communities for the better.

Then, I went to graduate school for urban planning, and I worked in community development and long-range planning for a number of years before taking on the resilience and climate work. [I worked as Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Los Angeles, and then the City of Houston, before returning home. It was amazing to be able to come back here to western Washington a few years ago and lead this work for communities near where I grew up.]

What does “resilience” mean to you?
There’s a definition that [the climate community] has used for a number of years that some folks have co-opted, about building back better and making sure communities can thrive no matter what obstacles they run into. That could be at an individual level, or a neighborhood level, or a regional level.

What types of partners would you like to engage further in King County’s climate work?
With the ambitious Strategic Climate Action Plan we’ve put together, there is an opportunity to engage even more partners. I’d love to hear from the business community, philanthropy, and companies who have employees here who are impacted by climate change and want to take more action. What our office does is not like with a typical government office – we can work with start-ups, and technology groups, and we’re interested in innovation and folks who are trying to innovate in this space.

We’d like to partner with them, and of course, continue our work with frontline communities and community-based organizations and all of the people who have lived experience and knowledge about why this work is so important, and why we need to continue to lead with equity.

What hopes do you have, or thoughts would you like to share about the future of climate action in King County?
I feel privileged to be able to lead this work in King County, at a time when we are continuing to have to fight at various levels for the resources needed to do *what* we need to do, by *when* we know we need to do it. King County has shown that they know we need to do it. They know *how* we need to do it. They know *by when* we need to do it. So now, we just need to do it.