Mike Barry is Head of Sustainable Business at the U.K. retailer Marks & Spencer. He was part of the small team that developed the company’s groundbreaking Plan A, a 100-point, five-year plan to address a wide range of environmental and social issues. He helps provide the vision and the energy to affect change and ensure a leading but efficient approach to sustainability across the company.
Barry deals with issues as diverse as sustainable fish sourcing, chemicals in products, labor standards in factories, animal welfare, food miles, privacy and data protection, genetic modification, fair trade, wood sourcing, community investment, cotton sourcing, and climate change. His working life is broadly divided into three parts: Listening to and prioritizing stakeholder expectations of Marks & Spencer, integrating them into corporate strategy, and working with shops, business units, and suppliers to deliver more sustainable products and wider business activity.
Prior to joining Marks & Spencer in 2000, Barry worked as an environment manager in the engineering sector and as an environmental consultant. He holds a B.Sc. in chemistry from Sheffield University.
In addition to his position as World Wildlife Fund’s Senior Vice President of Market Transformation, Jason Clay manages the WWF Network’s private-sector advisory board and is the architect of WWF’s private-sector engagement strategy. He is a leader within WWF and the NGO community more broadly on identifying global trends and issues as well as supply chain management.
Clay has co-convened multi-stakeholder roundtables to identify and reduce the social and environmental impacts of such products as salmon, soy, sugarcane, and cotton and helped draft the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil’s principles and criteria for sustainable palm oil. Over the course of his career he has run a family farm, taught at Harvard and Yale, worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helped create hundreds of products such as Rainforest Crunch with Ben & Jerry’s, and spent more than 25 years working with human rights and environmental organizations.
Clay, who received his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1979 in anthropology and international agriculture, founded the award-winning Cultural Survival Quarterly, and is the author of more than 250 articles and 15 books on the topics of environment, agriculture, aquaculture, poverty alleviation, and corporate social responsibility.
Michael Fernandez is Director of Global Public Policy for Mars, Incorporated. Fernandez joined Mars in November 2008 from the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, where he served as the Director of Science and then Executive Director. He was the Initiative’s primary public spokesperson and oversaw the Initiative’s research into science and policy questions generated by agricultural biotechnology, including the reports, workshops, and conferences prepared by Initiative staff.
Previously, Fernandez served as the Associate Administrator for the Agricultural Marketing Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he oversaw the agency’s science and technology programs and was instrumental in the development of the National Organic Standards Program.
From 1995 to 1999, he served as the Special Assistant to the Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances. Before that, he served as agricultural science and technology advisor to the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. Fernandez received a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree in biology from Princeton University.
Louis Lebel is the Director of the Unit for Social and Environmental Research (USER), Faculty of Social Sciences, at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. He is also the Science Coordinator for the Southeast Asian Regional Committee (SARCS) for START (the Global Change SysTem for Analysis, Research, and Training).
Lebel conducts research on the environment and development at multiple scales, from work on the livelihoods of ethnic minorities in northern Thailand, and studies of shrimp aquaculture in Thailand and Vietnam, to comparative and regional studies in Southeast Asia, and at the global scale on the carbon cycle. His main areas of theoretical and applied interest are in: cross-scale interactions, institutions, linkages between social and ecological systems, production/consumption chains, sustainable development policy andpolitics.
Lebel also helps plan and coordinate international research through the Global Environmental Change Programmes, the Sustainability Science Initiative, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the Resilience Alliance. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Zoology at the University of Western Australia.
Tom Lyon is the Director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan. He holds the Dow Chair of Sustainable Science, Technology, and Commerce, with appointments in both the Ross School of Business and the School of Natural Resources and Environment.
Lyon is a leader in using economic analysis to understand corporate environmental strategy and how it is shaped by emerging government regulations, nongovernmental organizations, and consumer demands. His book Corporate Environmentalism and Public Policy, published by Cambridge University Press, is the first rigorous economic analysis of this increasingly important topic. Lyon earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University and his doctorate at Stanford University. His current research focuses on corporate environmental information disclosure, greenwashing, the causes and consequences of renewable energy policy, and voluntary programs for environmental improvement.
Lyon has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago and at the University of Bonn, and a Fulbright Scholar at the Scuola Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy. He spent the 2002-2003 academic year as a Gilbert White Fellow at Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C., and the 2003-2004 academic year as a visiting economist in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Lyon serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and the Journal of Regulatory Economics. His teaching experience includes energy economics and policy, environmental governance, non-market strategy, regulation, managerial economics, business and government, game theory, business strategy, and the management of innovation.
Patrick Mallet is the Credibility Director at the ISEAL Alliance, where he is responsible for managing the development of consensus-based codes of good practice for the effective operation of voluntary standards systems. In 2004, he led the development of the ISEAL Code of Good Practice for Setting Social and Environmental Standards, which has since become the normative reference point for credible standard-setting practices.
Prior to founding the ISEAL Alliance in 2000, Mallet managed an international program in certification and marketing of non-timber forest products and was lead author on the multi-stakeholder Conservation Principles for Coffee Production. He is past Board Chair of the Certified Organic Associations of British Columbia.
He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Dalhousie University and a Diploma in Environment from McGill University.
Kira Matus is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in public policy and management in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She also holds an Associate Appointment with the Harvard University Sustainability Science Program at the Kennedy School of Government.
Matus’s research focuses on the application of innovative technology to address sustainable development. This includes exploring the potential of green chemistry as a so-called leapfrog technology in the United States, India, and China. She also researches the interactions between voluntary regulation and other forms of regulation, and their impacts on the sustainability of production/consumption systems. She is also currently the co-project director and lead investigator for manufacturing for Harvard University Sustainability Science Program’s Innovation and Access to Technologies for Sustainable Development initiative.
Matus received her Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University, and from 2007-2009 she was a recipient the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Graduate Fellowship. Matus also has an S.M. in Technology and Policy from MIT, and an Sc.B. in Chemistry from Brown University. Prior to joining the LSE, Matus was a Senior Policy Analyst at the Yale Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering.
Michael Vandenbergh is Professor of Law and Tarkington Chair in Teaching Excellence at the Vanderbilt University Law School. He is a leading scholar in environmental and energy law whose research explores the relationship between formal legal regulation and informal social regulation of individual and corporate behavior. His work has appeared in leading journals, including the Columbia Law Review, the Harvard Environmental Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the New York University Law Review, and the Stanford Environmental Law Journal.
Before joining Vanderbilt’s law faculty, Vandenbergh was a partner at a national law firm in Washington, D.C. He served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 1993 to 1995. He began his career as a law clerk to Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1987 and 1988. In addition to directing Vanderbilt’s Climate Change Research Network, Vandenbergh serves as director of the law school’s Environmental Law Program. A recipient of the Hall-Hartman Teaching Award, he teaches courses in environmental law, energy, and property. Vandenbergh has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and at Harvard Law School. He holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia.
Jan Kees Vis was trained as a chemist and received a Ph.D. in heterogeneous catalysis in 1984. He joined Unilever in 1985, at the Unilever Research Laboratory in Vlaardingen, the Netherlands. He held several positions there, then moved to Unilever’s foods business. For more than 10 years, Vis worked on environmental life cycle analysis, environmental management systems, environmental auditing and standard setting, environmental training, environmental reporting, and the preparation of policy proposals on environmental issues.
From 2001 to 2010, Vis served as Unilever’s Global Supply Chain Director, Sustainable Agriculture. In 2010 his title changed to Global Director, Sustainable Sourcing Development. He has been involved in, and holds or has held board positions in, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform, the Sustainable Food Laboratory, and the Roundtable for Responsible Soy.
Tensie Whelan serves as President of the Rainforest Alliance. She has been involved with the organization since 1990, first as a board member, and then later as a consultant, becoming the executive director in 2000.
Whelan has been working in the environmental field for more than 25 years, during which time she served as the Vice President of Conservation Information at the National Audubon Society and Executive Director of the New York League of Conservation Voters. Whelan also worked as a journalist and environmental communications consultant in Costa Rica, and was the Managing Editor of Ambio – an international environmental journal based in Stockholm. Prior to joining the Rainforest Alliance as its executive director, Whelan worked as a management consultant to nonprofit organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund.
Whelan serves on the boards of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition and Social Accountability International, is a member of the advisory board for corporate social responsibility at Fortis as well as the sustainable agriculture advisory board for Unilever, sits on the governing body of the U.N. Foundation’s World Heritage Alliance, and is the co-chair of the steering committee of the Sustainable Food Lab. She holds an M.A. in International Communication from American University’s School of International Service and a B.A. in Political Science from New York University. Whelan’s published work includes one of the first books on ecofriendly tourism, Nature Tourism: Managing for the Environment (1991, Island Press).
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