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Abby Reyes

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Director, UCI Community Resilience Projects

Abby Reyes directs Community Resilience Projects at the University of California, Irvine. The projects foster community-driven academic partnerships that honor and build community and climate resilience. At UC Irvine School of Law, Reyes has also taught a seminar on Law and Social Movements: Race, Place, and Climate Change. Current and recent projects include directing Alt-CERT, a statewide trainers’ training for community stewards and their academic allies on community-driven approaches to climate disaster preparedness; co-convening the planning process for a community resilience center in Santa Ana, California; directing CAPECA, an 18-month participatory action research training for 12 community-academic partnerships in California to advance equity-focused climate solutions; co-convening the Just Transition Lawyering Institute, a 14-week pilot training for practicing attorneys who support communities most affected by racial, economic, and environmental inequity; and co-convening Santa Ana Economía Regenerative Comunitaria, a community-academic partnership that supports local solidarity economy infrastructure in southern California. Reyes also participates in Colombia’s post-conflict transitional justice process stemming from her ongoing accompaniment of the U’wa Indigenous Nation in their decades’ long assertion of dignity against big oil. She is the author of Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice (2025). 

From 2013-2016, Reyes directed the UCI Sustainability Initiative and was a co-Principal Investigator of the NSF-sponsored FloodRISE project, leading the Research Integration and Impact Team. She co-chaired the Faculty Engagement and Education Working Group of the University of California President’s Global Climate Leadership Council and co-founded UCI’s Sustainability Resource Center. She provided facilitation and design services for the UC-CSU Knowledge Action Network on Transformative Climate and Sustainability Education; UCI Salton Sea Initiative; UCI OCEANS; UCI Research Justice Learning Community; Nexus 2014: Environmental Health and Justice; the Borrego Stewardship Council; and trained UC faculty, staff, community collaborators, and student activists in community leadership for climate resilience statewide. In response to the pandemic, Reyes co-convened the Orange County Health Equity COVID-19 Community Academic Partnership, co-producing the first health equity-focused contact tracing workshop series to build community-driven COVID-19 response within the region’s hardest hit communities.

Earlier in her career, the Scholar and the Feminist Conference of Barnard College named Reyes a “Model of Resistance” for her work directing the U’wa Defense Project, a legal and community organizing effort, and her work with rural fishing and farming communities through the Environmental Legal Assistance Center in the southern Philippines as a Henry Luce Scholar.

Reyes completed her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and JD at UC Berkeley Law. She clerked for the Honorable Richard A. Paez on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and recently finished her term co-chairing the board of directors of EarthRights International. She is an advisor to the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners and a participant in Movement Strategy Center’s transitions labs (2016-20) and collective acceleration learning communities. Reyes received UC Irvine’s 2015 Excellence in Leadership Award and a 2016 California Higher Education Sustainability Best Practices Award. She has a TEDx talk on How to Come Home.

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