Isabel Garro

Why organisations work with Isabel Garro

• She has held the policy seat, the multilateral seat, and the operating seat. Special Advisor to Spain’s High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda, founding Director General of the UN Global Compact Network Spain, now Chief Sustainability Officer EMEA at Votorantim Cimentos. Few ESG voices can read regulation, capital, and operations in one sitting.
• She built the institution that translates UN Global Compact commitments into corporate practice in Spain, then ran it for more than a decade. She speaks about ESG governance from the side that wrote the rules, not the side that complies with them.
• Her current operating role inside a major cement group means her view on climate transition is tested against one of the hardest decarbonisation problems in industry, not against a theoretical model.
• She is fluent in the gap between SDGs as communications and SDGs as commercial opportunity. The work is about which of the 17 goals contain a real margin, not which of them play well in a sustainability report.

Biography highlights

• Chief Sustainability Officer EMEA, Votorantim Cimentos, since November 2023.
• Founding partner and CEO of 3a4b, a sustainability strategy advisory firm based in Madrid.
• Founding Executive Director and Director General, UN Global Compact Network Spain, for more than a decade.
• Special Advisor to the High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda, Government of Spain, 2018 to 2020.
• President of the Local Networks Advisory Council of the UN Global Compact, the elected body that advises the Compact on regional decisions.
• Associate professor, Master’s in Competitive Social Transformation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and IE Business School. MBA, Brown University and IE Business School.

Biography

ESG arrived in the boardroom as a disclosure problem and is leaving as a capital allocation problem. The gap between what a company is required to say about sustainability and what it has to actually fund, build, and restructure to deliver on it has become one of the harder strategic questions of the decade. That gap is the territory Isabel Garro has worked in for more than twenty years, from the inside of government, the inside of the United Nations system, and now the inside of a major industrial group.

She founded the UN Global Compact Network Spain in 2005 and led it for over a decade as Director General, building the institution that translates global sustainability commitments into Spanish corporate practice. She was then appointed Special Advisor to Spain’s High Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda, working on the integration of the SDGs into national policy. She has also chaired and now presides over the Local Networks Advisory Council of the UN Global Compact, the elected body representing networks in over 60 countries.

Since November 2023 she has been Chief Sustainability Officer EMEA at Votorantim Cimentos, one of the largest cement and building materials groups in the world. That seat puts her inside one of the most operationally demanding decarbonisation problems in heavy industry, where the distance between net zero rhetoric and net zero engineering is unforgiving. She is also founding partner and CEO of 3a4b, advising organisations on sustainability strategy, and an associate professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and IE Business School on the Master’s in Competitive Social Transformation.

What makes her useful in a room of senior leaders is the working hypothesis she brings: that sustainability is now a competitive variable, not an external compliance cost, and that the companies treating it as the former will allocate capital differently from those still treating it as the latter. She holds an MBA from Brown University and IE Business School.

Key speaking topics

• ESG strategy and corporate governance
• The 2030 Agenda and SDGs as commercial opportunity
• Climate resilience and the decarbonisation of heavy industry
• Sustainable supply chains and stakeholder governance
• Sustainability reporting and regulatory change in Europe
• Regenerative business design and circular economy

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees setting ESG and climate strategy under tightening EU regulation
• Chief Sustainability Officers, Chief Strategy Officers and Chief Risk Officers building the operating layer behind sustainability commitments
• Industrial, infrastructure and capital-intensive groups facing real decarbonisation costs
• Public-private leadership forums on the SDGs, 2030 Agenda, and corporate-government cooperation

Audience outcomes

• A clearer separation between ESG as disclosure and ESG as operating substance, with the questions a board should be asking about each
• A working view of which of the 17 SDGs contain commercial margin for a given business model
• An honest read on the gap between net zero communication and net zero capital expenditure
• A practical map of how European sustainability regulation is reshaping corporate strategy this decade