Climate Action and Sustainability speakers
Voices shaping how organisations, industries and governments respond to the defining challenge of our time
Speakers Associates represents 158 speakers on Climate Action and Sustainability, including Peter Fisk, Mark Stevenson, Lucy Bullivant, Neri Karra Sillaman, Philippe Aghion, Yasin Kasirga, Shela Gobertina von Trapp, Louis De Jaeger, Lucy Shepherd and Claudia Bechstein.
Boards are being asked to govern sustainability, AI risk and inclusion at the same time, often with the same committee, and often with the same hour on the agenda. The instruments most directors were trained on were not designed for this. The question is no longer whether to address these pressures, but what defensible governance actually looks like when the political wind on each is moving in a different direction.
Sustainability commitments made at board level rarely survive contact with an Asian supply chain. Traceability, materials, certifications and audit trails sit thousands of miles away from the strategy deck, inside factories the company does not own. Closing that gap is what separates ESG narrative from operating substance.
Heritage brands now compete on cultural relevance, and most are not structured to produce it. The companies that hold their position refresh how they are perceived without diluting what they stand for. Sustainability commitments have moved from optional to expected, and the boards that turn those commitments into commercial advantage are the ones still building brand value at scale.
Energy has become the most consequential terrain of strategic risk for organisations operating across borders. Boards must weigh decarbonisation timelines against supply politics and the divergent energy realities of Global North and Global South economies. Most analysis they receive sees only one face of the system at a time.
Most large organisations now run innovation budgets that no longer match the returns they once produced. R and D spend rises, pilot projects multiply, and the gap between cost and commercial output widens. Leaders need a way to generate breakthrough growth with fewer resources, in conditions where capital, talent, and time are all under pressure.
Most organisations can articulate a growth strategy. Far fewer can explain why their business will still be competitive in twenty years. The research on what actually drives longevity – as distinct from short-term performance – points to a set of structural choices that established companies rarely make, because they were never forced to. That gap between building for the next cycle and building for the next generation is one of the most consequential and least examined problems in senior strategy conversations.
For boards, climate has shifted from a sustainability concern to a capital allocation question. Most decision frameworks have not caught up. Leaders need an economic case for the transition that is robust enough to reset investment policy and survive challenge from sceptical shareholders.
Climate strategy meetings turn into either technical exchange or PR theatre. The room rarely holds all the right voices at once: board, regulator, operating leader, sustainability lead. And the conversations that matter, what an organisation is actually willing to commit to next, rarely surface.
Boards are being asked to make capital, supply chain and partnership decisions in a world where the map of advantage is being redrawn. Sanctions, Eurasian realignment and resource competition no longer sit on the edge of the strategy conversation; they sit inside it. Most leadership teams lack a coherent way to read those shifts before they show up in the numbers.
Most workplaces are still designed around square footage and cost per desk, not the physiological reality of the people inside them. Leaders see the wellbeing numbers, the absence rates, the engagement scores, and have no design language to act on them. The gap between an HR wellbeing strategy and the actual building it is delivered in is where productivity, retention and culture quietly leak.
Net zero commitments have outrun the engineering and capital plans behind them. In aviation, motorsport, shipping and heavy transport, the existing fleet runs on liquid hydrocarbons and will for decades. Boards now need a credible answer for how to decarbonise that fleet without waiting for full electrification, and the engineering decisions made in the next three years will define which industries lead the transition and which import the technology from elsewhere.
Boards are being asked to commit capital across a world where the rules of trade, alliance and supply have stopped holding. China exposure, sanctions regimes, climate-driven migration and the reordering of supply chains now sit inside investment cases that were once treated as macro background. Leaders need a way to read the new map before they price the next decision.