ABOUT

Tom Bowman is an advisor, speaker, and changemaker who believes that the solutions to even the world’s toughest problems are within our grasp. His gift for distilling complex problems and scientific information to their central nugget empowers people to take ownership and act.

As principal of Bowman Change, Inc., Tom works with people and organizations who care deeply about their communities and their world. His clients are an eclectic mix of government agencies, water and energy utilities, cultural institutions, nonprofits, and businesses. Whether he’s delivering a keynote address or helping an organization chart a new course, Bowman emanates contagious passion as he creates clarity, facilitates insights, shifts perspectives, and inspires change for the better.

Bowman’s contributions as a strategic advisor on an Action for Climate Empowerment framework for the United States are helping shape our world’s future. This strategic framework is an initiative by educators, activists, policymakers, communication professionals, and others to advance the goals of the Paris Agreement. His latest book, What if Solving the Climate Crisis Is Simple?, was heralded by Michael Mann as an “inspiring, concise primer on climate action.” 

A social entrepreneur from day one, Bowman combines academic training in social ethics with over 30 years of experience in business ownership, marketing communication, and public education. 

While at Bowman Design Group, an exhibition design firm he founded in the late 1980s, Bowman’s career path was redirected after he completed climate change exhibitions for the Marian Koshland Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences and the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. 

Inspired to become part of the solution to the climate crisis, Bowman used his company as a lab. He made rapid, deep cuts in the firm’s carbon emissions and demonstrated a repeatable model for money-saving climate action. Walking the talk earned Bowman Design Group recognition from the California Air Resources Board as a Cool California Small Business of the Year. 

By 2008, Bowman had become the exhibition industry’s resident sustainability expert. For the next eight years, he wrote Exhibitor Magazine’s monthly sustainability column and, in 2014, he published his first book, The Green Edge, which was acclaimed as a practical, hands-on sustainability guide for the exhibition industry, as well as a model for effective business management.

Meanwhile, Bowman began consulting with scientists, economists, government leaders, communication researchers, and others on what is widely acknowledged to be our essential question—how to get businesses, cultural institutions, and the public engaged in responding to the climate–energy–health–justice challenge. He contributed to public ocean literacy guidelines, the federal climate change literacy guidelines, and the Urban Climate Change Research Network’s Second Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities. One of Bowman’s groundbreaking initiatives was a finalist for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

A sought-after advisor and communicator, Bowman regularly provides counsel on stakeholder and audience engagement and communication to federal agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Bowman continues to deliver creative communication services to cultural institutions and businesses including Aquarium of the Pacific and Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency. He also provides counsel to professional organizations and nonprofits such as American Geophysical Union, American Public Health Association, and the American Governors Association. 

Bowman was inducted into the International Green Industry Hall of Fame in 2015 and received the Sustainable Business Council of Los Angeles Best Public Advocate for Sustainability Award, a White House Champions of Change Award for ScienceToGo.org, and The Chicago Athenaeum Green Good Design Award. He serves on the board of the International Green Industry Hall of Fame, has served on the advisory boards for Climate Access and The Climate Museum, and is a co-founder of the Long Beach Sustainable Business Network. 

Leading news and scientific outlets featuring Bowman include CNN, NPR's Marketplace, Time, New York Times, Science, Yale Environment 360, and others. His academic training includes a BA from Johnston College and an MA from the University of Southern California in social ethics.