Sustainable Earth 2021: Speakers

Professor Kevin Anderson, Professor of Energy and Climate Change, University of Manchester

Kevin holds a joint chair between the School of Engineering at the University of Manchester, the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS) at the University of Uppsala (Sweden), and the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation at the University of Bergen (Norway). He has previously held the role of Zennström professor of climate change leadership at Uppsala and director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. 

Kevin has contributed to the development of Paris-compliant carbon budgets for Swedish Län and Kommuner and his analysis contributed to the UK’s Climate Change Act and subsequent national carbon budgets. Kevin is currently providing an evidence base to the European Commission’s development of EU carbon budgets.

John Elkington, Volans

As Founder and Chief Pollinator at Volans, John is one of the founders of the global sustainability movement, an experienced advisor to business, and a highly regarded keynote speaker and contributor, from conferences to boards and advisory boards. John tackles some of the world's most challenging problems, helping key actors move from the responsibility agenda through resilience to regeneration. He has inspired a number of Volans’ inquiries, including Project Breakthrough, Tomorrow’s Capitalism Inquiry and the Green Swans Observatory. He has worked with an A-to-Z of businesses worldwide, now helping the Volans team guide multinational companies to transform towards a regenerative future. John is the author Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism.

LinkedIn
Twitter: @volansjohn and @volanshq 
Green Swans Book: volans.com/project/green-swans

Dr Anna Birney, Forum for the Future

Anna is the Director of the School of System Change at Director of learning at Forum for the Future. She has nearly two decades of experience of designing and facilitating systems change processes for sustainability. She has worked on a wide range of issues and sectors, including a seven year Education Systems Change programme, the Marine CoLAB and Forum for the Futures projects around Sustainable Nutrition and Climate Change. She also coaches organisations with their systems change strategy development including Unilever, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Innovate UK and WWF-UK. In 2016 she launched the School of System Change, which is seeking to build an international learning community of change makers. Anna is the author of Cultivating Systems Change: A Practitioners Companion (2014). 

Twitter: @AnnasQuestions

Rob Passmore 

Rob Passmore, FRSA, has served as the Deputy Managing Director of Saatchi & Saatchi's European Internet Division. He has operated as CEO/Commercial Director in a range of digital businesses, including Momondo, which recently sold to Priceline for $500m. Operating as Commercial Director for social enterprise openDemocracy, he raised $5m from the Ford Foundation. He has started (and failed) in a range of start-ups and has taken multiple businesses from "idea on an envelope" through to £15m+ turnover. For the last five years, he has refocused his commercial skills onto environmental challenges. He is CEO of Smarter Carbon, Commercial Lead for the Biosphere Foundation, and serves on the Board of One Northern Devon.

Paul Barnard MBE, Plymouth City Council

Paul is a Chartered Town Planner and has over 30 years of experience working in Local Government. He joined Plymouth City Council in 1991 and has held a variety of planning policy, project management and senior management posts, delivering a series of service modernisation programmes.

Paul is a member of the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Town and Country Planning Association and the Association of Directors of Environment, Planning and Transport, where he chairs the Planning Group. He also sits on various boards, including being the Joint Chair of the Plymouth Local Nature Partnership.

Paul is responsible for coordinating Plymouth’s response to climate change following the City Council’s climate emergency declaration of March 2019. He has driven forward the production of the first two of 11 Corporate Carbon Reduction Plans and city-wide Climate Emergency Action Plans having established the Plymouth Net Zero Partnership in 2020.

Sarah Lee, Stride Treglown

Sarah is a chartered architect with 20 years’ experience in the SW commercial market working for Stride Treglown, one of the largest national practices in the UK, and has joint chaired the Plymouth branch of the RIBA for the last 4 years.

Sarah initiated and coordinates the Future Plymouth 2030 webinar series, identifying the opportunity for a collaboration between RIBA, the Sustainability Earth Institute at the University of Plymouth and wider built environment sector to respond to the Climate Emergency and find collaborative pathways to sustainable development. Sarah is currently developing a second series to help further accelerate the built environment and community’s action to achieve Plymouth’s target of Net Zero by 2030.

Paul Gilbert, South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SWMAS)

Paul is Manufacturing Business Specialist, underpinned with academic diplomas in both Business and Engineering fields. Paul has enjoyed varied roles within the team at South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SWMAS), leading on low carbon and sustainability issues. 2021 sees the launch of an exciting 5-year Clean Growth/Net Zero Programme aiming to engage manufacturers across the region to accelerate their journey to Net Zero and explore the many benefits that Clean Growth can bring. Paul is passionate about the environment and more so about achieving change and improvements with busy clients.

Mukti Mitchell, Carbon Savvy

Through his own experiments in low carbon living Mukti has discovered that not only does reducing your carbon footprint improve your quality of life, but genuinely improving your quality of life also reduces your carbon footprint!

His work includes: founding Mitchell & Dickinson, specialists in insulating period properties, saving over 10,000 tonnes of CO2 to date; building an award winning zero-emission micro yacht in which he sailed around Britain to promote low carbon living, reaching an audience of 10 million; writing an award-winning online carbon footprint calculator in 2005. In 2017 he was awarded Devon environment champion of the year. In 2020 Mukti started Carbon Savvy, a carbon literacy project working in collaboration with local councils to help them reach their 2030 zero emissions targets, including enabling people to understand simple ways to reduce their carbon footprint.

Emma Burlow, Lighthouse Sustainability

Emma is the founder of Lighthouse Sustainability and one of the UK’s leading specialists on circular economy and sustainability in businesses, working directly with business on sustainability for 25 years. This experience gives Emma a unique hands-on understanding of the success factors for implementing more circular business models, in particular, the importance of understanding the financial model, establishing key partnerships and understanding the marketplace.

In 2020, Emma started her #CE100 series to profile businesses working in the circular economy. Emma was the Head of Circular Economy at Resource Futures from 2016-2020, working with clients such as Waitrose, Central England Co-op, WRAP and Zero Waste Scotland. Emma is a Director of SevernNet, a circular economy focused business network in the Avonmouth area and leader of the Circular Economy Club (Bristol).