Jonathon Porritt
Most boards have made climate commitments their operating models cannot deliver. The gap between net-zero pledges and the capital, governance, and supply chain decisions actually being signed off is now visible to investors, regulators, and employees. Leadership teams need someone who can tell them, with authority and without flattery, where the real exposure sits and what credible action looks like.
Jonathon Porritt is a sustainability strategist and author who advises boards on what credible climate, ESG, and capitalism reform actually require of their business models, governance, and capital decisions.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jonathon Porritt
- Three decades inside the rooms where government, business, and civil society negotiate climate policy, including nine years chairing the UK Sustainable Development Commission for three prime ministers.
- Co-founder of Forum for the Future, the consultancy that has worked with Marks & Spencer, Unilever, and other FTSE boards on serious sustainability strategy rather than reporting compliance.
- Author of Capitalism as if the World Matters, a book that argues capitalism is the only viable vehicle for sustainability and sets out what reshaping it actually demands; cited as a foundational text in corporate sustainability curricula.
- Independence from any single corporate paymaster; willingness to tell senior teams what their own sustainability advisors will not.
- A long view that connects climate, biodiversity, inequality, and population; useful for boards trying to understand how environmental risks compound across a strategic horizon.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder and Founder Director of Forum for the Future (1996-2023), one of the world’s leading sustainability charities, with offices in the UK, US, India, and Southeast Asia.
- Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, 2000-2009, advising the Blair and Brown governments on environmental policy.
- Director of Friends of the Earth (UK), 1984-1990; former Co-Chair of the UK Green Party.
- Co-founder of The Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme, delivered through the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
- Author of Hope in Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020), The World We Made (Phaidon, 2013), and Capitalism as if the World Matters (Earthscan, 2005).
- CBE for services to environmental protection (2000); Chancellor of Keele University, 2012-2022.
Biography
The corporate climate agenda has run into its first credibility test. A decade of net-zero pledges, ESG reporting, and sustainability committees has not closed the gap between what boards say and what their capital plans deliver. Porritt has spent his working life inside that gap.
He co-founded Forum for the Future in 1996 with Sara Parkin and Paul Ekins, and ran it as Founder Director for nearly thirty years. Forum has worked with Marks & Spencer, Unilever, and other FTSE-100 boards on the harder questions of business model change, not the softer ones of disclosure. Before that, he ran Friends of the Earth (UK) through the late 1980s and co-chaired the Green Party.
For nine years he chaired the UK Sustainable Development Commission, advising Tony Blair and Gordon Brown directly. He also co-founded the Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme, now part of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, where senior executives go to interrogate their own sustainability strategies. Few people have spent as much time on both sides of that table.
His books map the argument. Capitalism as if the World Matters made the case that capitalism is the only viable engine for a sustainable future, and set out the reforms that case requires. The World We Made imagined 2050 as if those reforms had landed. Hope in Hell, written into the climate emergency, is sharper and more impatient. Read together, they explain why he is taken seriously by chief executives and climate activists alike, even when he is telling each of them something they would rather not hear.
Key speaking topics
- Sustainability strategy and ESG governance
- Climate risk and the energy transition
- Reforming capitalism for environmental limits
- Net-zero credibility and corporate accountability
- Long-term scenario planning and systems change
- Biodiversity, nature, and business
- Intergenerational responsibility and the next decade
Ideal for
- Board directors and CEOs reviewing the credibility of their net-zero and ESG commitments
- Chief Sustainability Officers and ESG leads building serious, board-ready strategy
- Investor relations and capital allocation teams under increasing scrutiny on transition planning
- Strategy and risk leaders trying to integrate climate and biodiversity into long-range planning
Audience outcomes
- A clearer reading of where their own organisation’s climate strategy is exposed to investor, regulator, and employee scrutiny
- A working understanding of what credible, board-level sustainability looks like beyond reporting compliance
- A sharper sense of how climate, biodiversity, inequality, and capital allocation compound as connected risks
- Direct, unflattering challenge from someone with no commercial interest in their answer