Ernesto Zedillo, Council Chair
Ernesto Zedillo is the Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization; Professor in the Field of International Economics and Politics; Professor of International and Area Studies; and Professor Adjunct of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. He currently teaches two undergraduate seminars at Yale on “Debating Globalization” and “The Economic Evolution and Challenges of the Latin American and Caribbean Countries” and formerly taught “Trade Theory and Policy,” an Economics Department lecture course. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from the School of Economics of the Natìonal Polytechnic Institute in Mexico and his MA and PhD at Yale University.
After almost a decade with the Central Bank of Mexico he served as Undersecretary of the Budget, Secretary of Economic Programming and the Budget, and Secretary of Education before serving as President of Mexico from 1994-2000.
Scott Barrett
Scott Barrett is the Lenfest-Earth Institute Professor of Natural Resource Economics at Columbia University in New York City with appointments in the School of International and Public Affairs and in The Earth Institute. He taught previously at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC and, before that, at the London Business School. He has also been a visiting scholar at École Polytechnique, Princeton, Yale, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Wissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin. Among other affiliations, he is a Fellow and former chairman of the advisory board of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics in the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Richard Branson
Since Richard Branson founded Virgin Atlantic in 1984, it has established itself as a leading global airline. Virgin Australia, Virgin America, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Limited Edition, Virgin Trains, Virgin Hotels and Virgin Galactic have followed in travel, while expansion elsewhere has seen Branson become the only person to build eight billion-dollar companies in eight different sectors. In 2004, he established non-profit foundation Virgin Unite to tackle tough social and environmental problems and strives to make business a force for good. Most of his time is now spent working with Virgin Unite and organisations it has incubated, such as The Elders, Carbon War Room, B Team and Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship. He also serves on the Global Commission on Drug Policy and supports ocean conservation with the Ocean Elders and Ocean Unite.
Gro Harlem Brundtland
Gro Harlem Brundtland, a medical doctor, was Norway’s first woman Prime Minister, serving a total of 10 years as head of government between 1981 and 1996. She chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development – known as the Brundtland Commission – which articulated the principle of sustainable development for the first time at a global level. She was also Director-General of the World Health Organization from 1998 to 2003, UN Special Envoy for Climate Change from 2007 to 2010 and, from 2011 to 2012, was a member of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Global Sustainability Panel.
Luísa Dias Diogo
Luisa Dias Diogo is currently Chairman of Barclay’s Bank and Chairman of the Global Alliance in Mozambique. Previously, she served as the first female Prime Minister of Mozambique (2004-2010) and before that as Minister of Planning and Finance for five years. When in government, Diogo led the process of economic reform and transformation as part of the Mozambique Development Plan, as well as the plan to combat poverty and hunger.
Recently, Diogo acted as Vice-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Harvard Ministerial Leadership Forum of health and education ministers. Diogo was designated by Times Magazine in 2004 as one of the one hundred most Influential people in the world and by Forbes Magazine as one of the one hundred most powerful women in the world.
Christiana Figueres
Christiana Figueres is a world authority on global climate change and was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) from 2010-2016. She is currently Vice-Chair of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, ClimateWorks Board Member, World Bank Climate Leader, Senior Fellow for Conservation International, Leadership Council Member of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, and Mission2020 Convenor.
During her tenure at the UNFCCC, Figueres brought together national and subnational governments, corporations and activists, financial institutions and communities of faith, think tanks and technology providers, NGOs and parliamentarians to jointly deliver the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, in which 195 sovereign nations agreed on a collaborative path forward to limit future global warming to below 2°C. The agreement entered into force in less than a year, breaking the record of the UN. For this achievement, Figueres has been credited with forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy.
Dabo Guan
Professor Dabo Guan is a Climate Change Economist at the University of East Anglia. He is also a Senior Member of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. He specialises in environmental economics for international climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, scenario analysis on environmental impacts, water resources accounting and management, input-output modelling and their applications in both developed and developing countries.
Guan was a lead author for the Working Group III of the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has authored 100 publications, including articles published in Science, Nature, Climate Change Science and PNAS. He has received the PNAS Cozzarelli Prize 2014, the Leontief Prize three times and the Philip Leverhulme Prize.
Andy Haines
Sir Andy Haines is Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). He was Dean (subsequently Director) of the LSHTM for nearly 10 years until October 2010. He was a family doctor in inner London for many years and formerly Professor of Primary Health Care at UCL.
His international experience includes a secondment at WHO Geneva and working in Jamaica, Nepal and the US. His publications cover topics such as climate change and health, evaluation of complex interventions in primary care and various aspects of global health policy. He has been a member of many national and international committees including the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (for the 2nd, 3rd and 5th assessment reports), and the WHO Advisory Committee on Health Research. He was Chair of the Rockefeller Foundation/Lancet Commission on Planetary Health, the international scientific collaboration for the 2009 Lancet series on the ‘Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions’ and the 2007 Lancet series on ‘Energy and Health’.
Naina Lal Kidwai
Naina Lal Kidwai is Chairman of Max Financial Services and Advent Private Equity. She is also Non-Executive Director on the global board of Nestlé, CIPLA Ltd and Larsen and Toubro, and has been past President of FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry). She retired in December 2015 as Executive Director on the board of HSBC Asia Pacific and Chairman of HSBC India.
With an MBA from Harvard Business School, she has featured regularly on listings by Fortune magazine and other listings of international women in business. She has received many awards and honours in India, including the Padma Shri prize for her contribution to trade and industry by the Government of India in 2007. She has edited two books Contemporary Banking in India and 30 Women in Power: Their Voices, Their Stories.
Jacob J. Lew
Jacob J. Lew served as the 76th Secretary of the Treasury from 2013 to 2017 under the Obama Administration. Prior to this role, he served as President Obama’s Chief of Staff, after serving as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Lew first joined the Obama Administration as Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources. Before joining the Department of State, he served as Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer for two different Citigroup business units. Prior to that, he was an Executive Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of New York University and a professor of public administration.
Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak
H.E. Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak has devoted her career to environmental conservation. She is the Managing Director of the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi (EAD), the largest environmental regulator in the Arabian Gulf, with a crucial role in conservation and the promotion of sustainable development in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Under her leadership, the Emirate underwent a myriad of changes to the environment, and the agency had to evolve quickly to keep pace with the rapid development.
She is also the Managing Director of the Mohamed Bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund – one of the world’s largest philanthropic endowments supporting species conservation in over 200 countries. Under her leadership, the fund has garnered global attention for demonstrating best practice in the sustainability of their endowment-based funding model. She is the Chairperson of the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA) and is the Managing Director of Emirates Nature in association with WWF.
Carlos Nobre
Carlos A. Nobre is an Earth System scientist from Brazil. He graduated in Electronics Engineering from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology (ITA), Brazil, in 1974 and obtained a PhD in Meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1983. He dedicated his scientific career mostly to Amazonian and climate science at Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).
Nobre is the former National Secretary of R&D of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil and former President of the Federal Agency for Post-Graduate Education – CAPES. He is foreign Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the Brazilian Academy of Science and of the World Academy of Science. He was awarded the Volvo Environmental Prize and the Von Humboldt Medal of EGU, and was an author of IPCC AR4, which was awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Paul Polman
Paul Polman has been CEO of Unilever since January 2009. Under his leadership, Unilever has an ambitious vision to fully decouple its growth from overall environmental footprint and increase its positive social impact through the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.
Polman actively seeks cooperation with other companies to implement sustainable, long-term business strategies and drive systemic change. He is Chairman of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a Member of the International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and a Member of the B Team, and sits on the board of the UN Global Compact and the Consumer Goods Forum, where he co-chairs the Sustainability Committee.
Nicholas Stern
Lord Stern is IG Patel Professor of Economics and Government at the London School of Economics as well as Head of the India Observatory (LSE) and Chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He is President-elect for the Royal Economics Society and is a Member of the G20 Eminent Persons Group. He was President of the British Academy (July 2013 – July 2017) and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (2014).
Lord Stern has held previous posts at universities in the UK and abroad. He was Chief Economist at both the World Bank (2000-2003) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (1994-1999). He was Head of the UK Government Economic Service (2003-7) and produced the landmark Stern Review on the economics of climate change. He was knighted for services to economics in 2004, made a cross-bench life peer as Baron Stern of Brentford in 2007 and in June 2017, was appointed Companion of Honour for services to economics, international relations and tackling climate change. His most recent book is Why are We Waiting? The Logic, Urgency and Promise of Tackling Climate Change.
Mark Tercek
Mark Tercek is President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organization. He is the co-author of the Washington Post and Publisher’s Weekly bestselling book Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature.
Before joining The Nature Conservancy in 2008, Tercek was a Partner and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs where he worked for 24 years. Starting in 2005, he led the firm’s environmental strategy and its Environmental Markets Group. Inspired by the opportunity to help businesses, governments and environmental organizations work together in new, innovative ways, he left Goldman Sachs in 2008 to head up The Nature Conservancy. He is a champion of the idea of natural capital — valuing nature for its own sake as well as for the services it provides for people, such as clean air and water, productive soils and a stable climate.