Senior environmental strategist Dr. Lea Borkenhagen will lead the non-public sector engagement division of Environmental Protection Fund. EDF+Business is thought for forging sudden partnerships with excessive–influence firms – together with McDonalds, Walmart, and KKR – to remodel enterprise as standard of their merchandise, operations, and advocacy. EDF+Enterprise has since expanded work in accelerating company internet zero motion, environmental coverage advocacy, investor engagement on local weather points, and eradicating poisonous chemical compounds from merchandise.
“I’m excited to steer the gifted and forward-thinking EDF+Enterprise crew as we speed up enterprise’ drive in direction of a internet zero, wholesome, and equitable financial system. Collectively, we are going to catalyze an bold imaginative and prescient, allow system-changing collaboration and innovation, and use all of EDF’s scientific, policy-based and business-facing capabilities to attain our objectives and to assist ship novel approaches for our widespread future,” mentioned Dr. Borkenhagen.
Dr. Borkenhagen brings twenty years of expertise in driving constructive environmental and social outcomes by enterprise management by creating future-facing methods with the highest international meals, trend, retail, and tech firms. She served as International Technique and Innovation Advisor to the Earthshot Prize, crafting the technique to search out options to the world’s most urgent environmental challenges. Previous to that, Lea spent a decade at Nike, the place she led a brand-only collaboration of world trend, retail, and sportswear firms representing over $250B in income to ship accelerated impacts on sustainability industry-wide. Lea headed Nike’s technique to overturn a decades-old method to labor and as an alternative worth it as a income driver, working from manufacturing unit degree to Board.
Lea applies her on-the-ground data on agriculture, forestry, and manufacturing to innovating on sustainability in enterprise. Earlier than Nike, Lea led Oxfam GB’s international livelihoods work, enabling her crew to co-found the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Higher Cotton Initiative, to construct globally related frameworks for understanding enterprise impacts on poverty, and to create accelerator fund mechanisms to assist companies that improved wages for low-income populations.
Lea holds a PhD in Environmental Science, Coverage and Administration from the College of California at Berkeley on agriculture in Indonesia and was a Fulbright Scholar within the Cote d’Ivoire. Earlier in her profession, Lea targeted on biodiversity and forest conservation, contributing to the primary WRI-IUCN-UNEP International Biodiversity Technique the place she pioneered a concentrate on gender and was awarded by UNEP as a New Technology Chief. Her undergraduate diploma from Harvard College examined primate and forest ecology in Indonesia.
“Now we have till 2030 to drive vital emissions cuts throughout the worldwide financial system. We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Borkenhagen at a time when the stakes couldn’t be greater to place enterprise engagement for local weather motion into overdrive,” mentioned Elaine Gowdy, Affiliate Vice President of EDF+Enterprise.
