Biography
O’Shannon Burns is a researcher and sustainability consultant with nearly 20 years of experience shaping mission-driven businesses and embedding regenerative principles into operations, with a focus on travel, tourism, climate action, conservation and environmental justice. As Senior Fellow for Sustainable Tourism at Cornell’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise, she advances the Center’s sustainable tourism portfolio, including the Sustainable Tourism Asset Management Program (STAMP).
O’Shannon has helped shape and lead STAMP’s partnership with the USDA Forest Service in Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest region, which began in 2024. The work supports the redevelopment of a recreation area affected by recent hurricanes. It focuses on encouraging alternative tourism that brings greater value to adjacent communities and on putting destination management strategies in place to prevent negative impacts as tourism grows. Its analyses of tourism markets, supply chains, sustainable infrastructure, regional planning, and policy give public agencies and communities an evidence base for deciding where and how tourism can grow responsibly. The approach can also be applied to other protected areas facing similar pressures.
O’Shannon supported Cornell’s multi-year partnership with the Mastercard Foundation in Rwanda, Hanga Ahazaza, an initiative that trains professionals in Rwanda’s hospitality and tourism sectors. As part of this work, STAMP and the Rwanda Development Board developed a teaching case study on Rwanda’s approach to public-private management of protected-area tourism. She is also an instructor for the eCornell course Sustainable Tourism Destination Management, which STAMP developed. The eight-module course gives tourism professionals and students a practical framework and tools to measure and manage tourism’s unaccounted impacts, plan for climate, manage shared assets equitably, and build long-term destination management capacity.
Since 2026, O’Shannon has been part of the World Bank Group’s Environment Global Department, where she supports the Global Wildlife Program’s knowledge platform on nature-based tourism and wildlife economies. Working across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, she advises World Bank teams and client countries on destination management and nature-based tourism business development. She also leads capacity building and knowledge exchange that help countries and partners strengthen the planning, governance, and management of protected and conserved areas.
She also leads Ochre, a consulting practice, and co-founded Aurora Collective, a women-led collective focused on systems change. She is co-editor of Regenerative Tourism and Hospitality (Routledge). Previously, she spent a decade at National Geographic, where she held National Geographic Partners’ first full-time sustainability position.
O’Shannon holds a master’s degree in sustainability from Harvard University, a B.S. in physical geography from Penn State, and an executive certificate in facilitation from Georgetown University.