Marta Antonelli has been exploring how to accelerate the transition towards sustainable food systems as business advisor, researcher, and lecturer over the past 12 years. Her expertise lies in food, water and agricultural policy; sustainable and healthy diets; urban food systems; food waste; climate change; the Sustainable Development Goals.
As Food Systems Project Lead at Global Footprint Network, she contributes to research on the Ecological Footprint of food and the Food4Future project.
She earned a Ph.D. in Environment, Politics and Development (King’s College London), with a thesis on food and water security in the Middle East and North African region. She received a MSc in International Economics (La Sapienza University of Rome) and a MSc in Development Studies (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).
She has authored 50+ publications in scientific journals, reports, books, as well as articles on media outlets. She co-edited the book Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through Sustainable Food Systems (Springer, 2019).
She is one of the 45 members of the expert group of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre that will help develop the legislative framework of the Farm to Fork Strategy.
Marta lives in Zurich. She enjoys working in multidisciplinary teams, the great outdoors, and good music.
As Chief Science Officer at Global Footprint Network, David Lin oversees the science related to Ecological Footprint and biocapacity accounting. He brings scientific rigor, technical expertise, and creativity to the research, data products, tools, and applications we provide at Global Footprint Network. Drawing on his experience leading the production and improvement of the National Footprint and Biocapacity accounts (NFBA), he now serves as member of the NFBA Science Advisory Committee. He previously led the cities and local government program and continues to bring a strong passion to working with various stakeholders to envision and achieve a sustainable future.
Prior to joining Global Footprint Network, David earned his Ph.D. and worked as a post-doctoral researcher in the Systems Ecology Laboratory at the University of Texas at El Paso. His research brought him to Arctic regions of Russia and Alaska, and he developed and deployed rapid assessment sensor systems, and applied geospatial tools and statistical models to understand the effect of land cover change on ecosystem function in Arctic tundra ecosystems and predict the effects of climate change on greenhouse gas dynamics. David is a native of California and holds a BS in Biology with specialization in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution from the University of California, Los Angeles. On most weekends you can find him enjoying nature, hiking and rock climbing in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sierra Nevada mountains.
Debora has written her final master dissertation on “Tourism and Sustainable Development: toward a Tourism Net Impact Index” in synergy with Global Footprint Network, IUCN, WWF-Med and CAST Rimini. The research is a review assessment on social, economic and environmental indicators (Footprint included) aiming to work as a baseline to develop an integrated tool assessing tourism’s impact. Debora holds an international master degree in Tourism Economics and Management. She has former working experience in tourism: as a trainee for the European Institute of Cultural Routes (Erasmus +) and the Italian Institute of Culture in Shanghai (MAECI-MIUR-CRUI scholarship), as selling and reservation manager for a local travel agency promoting local tourism in Maldives. Having always been passionate about sustainability, she recently joined the Global Footprint Network to support the research team in the implementation of tourism-related projects and other projects in the Mediterranean region.
With a strong background in strategy in an international context, Nicolas brings a blend of corporate, impact investing, and policy analysis experience to his position with Global Footprint Network.
Prior to joining Global Footprint Network, Nicolas spent nearly a decade in early-stage investments and impact investing in Southeast Asia. He also organized high-level networking sessions for business executives and policy makers between Asia and the US / Europe. Nicolas is a strong believer in the effectiveness of a blended finance approach, which allows for harnessing a wide array of resources — from private investments to grants to technical assistance support, among others — to support ventures that combine a strict allocation of funds with a multi-bottom line approach that includes societal and environmental considerations.
At AXA, a leading insurance and financial services group, Nicolas worked closely with the Group’s main executive bodies on a wide array of issues (as a strategic auditor at the Group’s HQ in Paris) before joining the executive committee of AXA Life Japan, where he was in charge of strategy and business development.
Nicolas honed his international policy analysis skills at the Brookings Institution, a leading think tank based in Washington, D.C. where he was a visiting fellow for two years (foreign policy studies). He also taught risk management and international affairs at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris, as an adjunct professor.
A graduate of Sciences Po, Nicolas holds an MBA from the London Business School and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School. He splits his time between Vietnam and France.
Sandra Browne is serving as interim CFO and currently is the Chief Operating Officer of Industrial Logic, Inc. She also was Global Footprint Network’s COO from 2011 to 2018, where she created HR processes for recruiting and performance management, aided the creation of a revised strategic plan, and implemented systems for tracking operations and finance analytics to enable timely, data-driven decisions.
Sandra has 20 years of experience as a business operations executive for technical and scientific organizations. She earned her MBA from UC Berkeley with an emphasis in organizational behavior and strategy. Throughout her career Sandra has focused on creating high-performance cultures that are financially stable and data-driven.
Prior to working at Footprint Network, Sandra managed company-wide operations for several consulting companies, including a multi-office transportation engineering firm and a global agile software development company. She was also the VP of Engineering for a software consulting firm, where she managed custom software development projects for enterprise clients.
Sandra’s interests include global travel and volleyball. She lives in California with her husband and two children.
Robert Williams manages the Global Footprint Network computer network and IT department and is responsible for the computer programming that is required to calculate the National Footprint Accounts. He is also responsible for the design, implementation and maintenance of the database systems, which hold the National Footprint Accounts data. Robert has a broad background in programming, database management and systems administration. He is also the owner of Cosmetto, an information technology (IT) consulting company, that provides custom IT services to small businesses in the Bay Area. Robert has certificates in Java and C++ programming from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a B.S. in computer information systems (summa cum laude) from Excelsior College.
Alessandro is a macro-ecologist, sustainability scientist, wannabe geographer, with a passion for anthropology and human behavior. Currently, he works as Senior Scientist and Mediterranean-MENA Program Director at Global Footprint Network.
His research focuses on the overall human metabolism (e.g., land-use, agriculture, fisheries, energy and climate change) and how it squares with the planet’s limits, especially in key societal sectors such as food, tourism and education. His main ambition is to contribute to, and support evidence based decision-making processes, via sustainability indicators and environmental accounting tools to help address the global challenge of living well within the limits of our planet.
Since 2008, Alessandro has been working with government agencies, NGOs, and academia in Europe, North and Latin America, and the Middle East. He has collaborated with the national government of the United Arab Emirates (as technical advisor on the Al Basama Al Beeiya – Ecological Footprint – Initiative), Kuwait, Morocco, Slovenia and Montenegro, where he supported the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism in the national transposition of the global SDGs, and contributed to the country’s National Strategy for Sustainable Development 2016-2030.
Alessandro holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the University of Siena and has authored more than 50 articles in leading peer-review journals (h-index = 30), has served as Steering Committee member of the Biodiversity Indicator Partnership (BIP), and is currently member of the Scientific Committee of the MedSEA Foundation, member of the Board of Directors of the Common Home of Humanity Initiative, and scientific advisor to the Planetary Accounting Network. As of July 2022, Alessandro is the elected President of the MEET Network Association.
Serena first connected with Global Footprint Network in 2010 during the Footprint Forum in Colle di val d’Elsa (Siena), Italy. Since then, she became a passionate Ecological Footprint researcher, focusing her work on resource and natural capital accounting methods, with a particular focus on carbon measurements and the distinction between humans’ use of stock vs. flows of natural capital. As a member of the research team, she contributes to research on the Ecological Footprint methodology and technical publications, as well as to Footprint applications at the national and local scale within a Mediterranean context. Serena holds a Ph.D. in Earth, Environment and Polar Sciences from the University of Siena.
Mathis Wackernagel is co-founder and on the board of Global Footprint Network. He currently also serves as an interim advisor to Global Footprint Network staff.
In 1990, he started to create the Ecological Footprint with Professor William Rees at the University of British Columbia as part of his Ph.D. in community and regional planning. Mathis also earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Mathis has worked on sustainability with governments, corporations and international NGOs on six continents and has lectured at more than a hundred universities. He previously served as director of the Sustainability Program at Redefining Progress in Oakland, California, and ran the Centro de Estudios para la Sustentabilidad at Anáhuac University in Xalapa, Mexico. Mathis has authored and contributed to more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, numerous articles, reports and various books on sustainability that focus on embracing resource limits and developing metrics for sustainability, including Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth; Sharing Nature’s Interest; Der Footprint: Die Welt neu vermessen; Ecological Footprint: Managing Our Biocapacity Budget; and WWF International’s Living Planet Report.
Mathis’ awards include the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, being a 2014 ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame Inductee, the 2013 Prix Nature Swisscanto, 2012 Blue Planet Prize, 2012 Binding Prize for Nature Conservation, the 2012 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, the 2011 Zayed International Prize for the Environment (jointly awarded with UNEP), an honorary doctorate from the University of Berne in 2007, a 2007 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, 2006 WWF Award for Conservation Merit and 2005 Herman Daly Award of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics. He was also selected as number 19 on the en(rich) list identifying the 100 top inspirational individuals whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures (www.enrichlist.org). John Elkington identified Mathis among the “Zeronaut 50” Roll of Honor, i.e., leading pioneers who are driving the world’s most significant problems to zero. From 2011 to 2015, Mathis was also the Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Visiting Professor at Cornell University.
A manager and spokesperson with over 25 years of international, cross-functional business and non-profit experience, Steven has held senior management positions at Mercedes-Benz, Airbus, the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary NetJets, the environmental non-profit CDP, and the EU standards setter EFRAG.
In his prior role as the Managing Director of CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) in Europe, he helped built the non-profit organization into the world’s largest repository of voluntarily reported corporate climate, water and forest data, preparing the landscape for legislation on ESG reporting. Consequently, Steven served as Senior Advisor Sustainability to the Chair of the EU project task force (EFRAG-European Financial Reporting Advisory Group), which was mandated to develop corporate sustainability reporting standards for the European Union.
His work has helped shape ESG policy, the world’s largest investor initiative on natural capital, and various European Unions’ reporting initiatives, including ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards) and ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme).
He serves as an advisory board member of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a steering group member of the EFRAG Reporting Lab, a Trustee of the Live Forum Foundation, an advisor to several green tech start-ups and funds, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS) with the Institute of British Geographers. He has contributed to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), and the Wirtschaftsrat Deutschland (German Economic Council) for many years. Steven is also a regular contributor to industry journals, conferences, and knowledge sharing at universities and think tanks, including the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., the University of Geneva, as well as INSEAD in Paris.
He holds Master’s degrees from Harvard Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Solvay Business School in Brussels, Belgium.
Steven enjoys sailing, biking and hiking with his daughter and two dogs.
Sarosh Kumana is a sustainability advocate, real estate entrepreneur, and angel investor. He is based in Incline, Nevada, and has over 40 years of startup and management experience. Sarosh founded and ran a leading California government foreclosure brokerage and a mortgage brokerage company for over 25 years. He is the president of PIP Inc., which owns and manages a large portfolio of animal-friendly apartment buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is President of Pacific Capital Management, having made over 200 early-stage investments over the past 20 years. He is a member of Sierra Angels and Health Tech Capital; a limited partner in numerous VC funds; former President of the Board of Directors of Sand Hill Angels in Silicon Valley; and a former Managing Partner at The Batchery, a Berkeley-based incubator.
Sarosh has a deep commitment to global sustainability. In addition to his work with Global Footprint Network, he sponsors and supports a number of projects in the US and around the world through his Foundation for a Sustainable Future, including education and replicating successful businesses that increase sustainability. In San Francisco, he is actively involved in civic, community, and political affairs, particularly involving housing and good government issues. Sarosh serves on the Advisory Council of the Center for Entrepreneurship at Tepper Business School, Carnegie Mellon University. Sarosh received a B.Com. from Sydenham College, University of Bombay, and an MBA from Carnegie-Mellon University.
As an independent advisor, Heiko is an advocate for transformation. He brings to the table over 30 years of experience in the field of sustainability, with particular expertise connecting the broad spectrum of philanthropy engagement with the entire field of socially and environmentally viable investment practices. Through his passion for regenerative principles and key topics such as food, water, agriculture, biodiversity or purpose-driven economy, he is devoted to co-creating new, more consciously interconnected, and resilient systems, which align nature and people.
He holds an MBA from the University of Frankfurt and is a qualified Trust & Estate Practitioner (TEP). In the summer of 2019, he was certified as a warm data lab host by the International Bateson Institute (IBI) and has since expanded practise in analogue and digital learning spaces.
He has worked with different service providers in the field of green investments and further in his career joined a multi-family office in Zurich to set up their charity services, guiding and representing the clients in their philanthropic efforts and managing their projects globally. He then headed the Philanthropy and Social Responsible Investment Advisory at Credit Suisse, advising the bank’s premium clients.
Heiko is the founding Director of specking+partners based in Zurich. The firm provides guidance to high net-worth individuals, foundations and corporations on topics such as responsible behaviour, systems change and sustainable long-term business or funding strategies.
In the past decade, he has regularly facilitated and moderated panel discussion on emerging topics online and in physical meetings. He lectures and runs workshops at different Universities in Switzerland and abroad. As an advisor to The Klosters Forum, he co-designs the yearly program of different events relating to the topic of regenerative ecosystems and cultures.
As Managing Director, Lewis oversees strategic development, program implementation, and staff management at Hot or Cool Institute. Previously, Lewis has served as Executive Director of SEED, founded as a UN partnership at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development to promote entrepreneurship for sustainable development. Prior to that, he was Director for Sustainable Consumption and Production at the think tank Institute for Global Environmental Strategies. He has consulted with organizations including United Nations agencies, the Asian and African Development Banks, the European Commission, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and has served as technical or science-policy adviser to several national government delegations, including Finland, Japan, Sweden, Indonesia, Hungary. Lewis conceived and led the 1.5-Degree Lifestyles project, analysing potential contribution of lifestyle changes to the aspirational 1.5 °C target under the Paris Agreement on climate change. He co-lead the United Nations One Planet programme on Sustainable Lifestyles and Education. He has an M.Sc. Sustainable Resource Management (Technical University Munich, Germany) and a Ph.D. Political Economy (University of Helsinki, Finland).
Sandra Browne is the Chief Operating Officer of Industrial Logic, Inc. She also served as Global Footprint Network’s COO from 2011 to 2018, where she created HR processes for recruiting and performance management, aided the creation of a revised strategic plan, and implemented systems for tracking operations and finance analytics to enable timely, data-driven decisions.
Sandra has 20 years of experience as a business operations executive for technical and scientific organizations. She earned her MBA from UC Berkeley with an emphasis in organizational behavior and strategy. Throughout her career Sandra has focused on creating high-performance cultures that are financially stable and data-driven.
Prior to working at Footprint Network, Sandra managed company-wide operations for several consulting companies, including a multi-office transportation engineering firm and a global agile software development company. She was also the VP of Engineering for a software consulting firm, where she managed custom software development projects for enterprise clients.
Sandra’s interests include global travel and volleyball. She lives in California with her husband and two children.
Mathis Wackernagel is co-founder of Global Footprint Network. He created the Ecological Footprint with Professor William Rees at the University of British Columbia as part of his Ph.D. in community and regional planning. Mathis also earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.
Mathis has worked on sustainability with governments, corporations and international NGOs on six continents and has lectured at more than a hundred universities. He previously served as director of the Sustainability Program at Redefining Progress in Oakland, California, and ran the Centro de Estudios para la Sustentabilidad at Anáhuac University in Xalapa, Mexico. Mathis has authored and contributed to more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, numerous articles, reports and various books on sustainability that focus on embracing resource limits and developing metrics for sustainability, including Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth; Sharing Nature’s Interest; Der Footprint: Die Welt neu vermessen; Ecological Footprint: Managing Our Biocapacity Budget; and WWF International’s Living Planet Report.
Mathis’ awards include the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, being a 2014 ISSP Sustainability Hall of Fame Inductee, the 2013 Prix Nature Swisscanto, 2012 Blue Planet Prize, 2012 Binding Prize for Nature Conservation, the 2012 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award of the International Society for Ecological Economics, the 2011 Zayed International Prize for the Environment (jointly awarded with UNEP), an honorary doctorate from the University of Stirling in 2022 and the University of Berne in 2007, a 2007 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, 2006 WWF Award for Conservation Merit and 2005 Herman Daly Award of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics. He was also selected as number 19 on the en(rich) list identifying the 100 top inspirational individuals whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures (www.enrichlist.org). John Elkington identified Mathis among the “Zeronaut 50” Roll of Honor, i.e., leading pioneers who are driving the world’s most significant problems to zero. From 2011 to 2015, Mathis was also the Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of 1956 Visiting Professor at Cornell University.
You can find out more about him on his personal website at www.wackernagel.info.
Razan al Mubarak, Former Secretary-General, Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi
John Balback, Strategist, Investor and C-suite Executive
Susan Burns, Co-founder of Global Footprint Network, Sustainability Strategist & Philanthropic Advisor
Kristin Cobble, Co-founder and President of Groupaya
Eric Frothingham, Social Entrepreneur and Business Lawyer
Alexa Firmenich, Co-director of SEED Biocomplexity, housed inside the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich and Impact Investor
Jamshyd Godrej, Chairman of the Board, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company Limited
Daniel Goldscheider, Founder and CEO, Paperless Inc.
Ann Hancock, Co-founder, The Climate Center
André Hoffmann, Vice Chairman of Roche Holding and former Vice President of WWF International
Ivo Knoepfel, OnValues
Rob Lilley, Investor and Member, Terra Global Capital
Haroldo Mattos de Lemos, Presidente na Sociedade dos Engenheiros e Arquitetos do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – SEAERJ
Louis de Montpellier, Former Deputy Head of the Banking Department, Bank for International Settlements, Chair of rePLANET
Cara Pike, Executive Director, Social Capital Strategies
Michael Saalfeld (1952-2021), green energy entrepreneur
Terry Vogt, Managing Director, Terra Global Capital
Caren Wakoli, Executive Director, Emerging Leaders Foundation
Rosalía Arteaga Serrano, Former President of the Republic of Ecuador
Fabio Feldmann, Former Minister of Environment, São Paulo
Eric Garcetti, Mayor, Los Angeles
Stephen Groff, Governor of the National Development Fund of Saudi Arabia, former Vice President, Asia Development Bank, Southeast Asia/Pacific
Daniel Pauly, Leading marine ecologist, University of British Columbia
Jorgen Randers, Professor of Climate Strategy, Norwegian School of Management
Peter Raven, Former President, Missouri Botanical Gardens
William E. Rees, Co-creator of the Ecological Footprint, University of British Columbia
Karl-Henrik Robèrt, Founder, The Natural Step
Emil Salim, Former Indonesian Minister of State
James Gustave Speth, Founder, World Resources Institute
Per Espen Stoknes, chair of the Center for Green Growth at the Norwegian Business School
David Suzuki, Award-winning Scientist and Broadcaster
M.S. Swaminathan, India’s Leading Scientist on Sustainable Food Security
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Founding President of Wuppertal Institute
Dominique Voynet, Former Environment Minister, France, and Former Mayor, Montreuil
Herman Daly (1938-2022), Intellectual Father of Ecological Economics
Tom Lovejoy (1941-2021), Fierce and effective biodiversity advocate
Wangari Maathai (1940-2011), Founder of the Green Belt Movement
Manfred Max-Neef (1932-2019), Economist, recipient of Right Livelihood Award
Will Steffen (1947-2023), Former Director, Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute
E.O. Wilson (1929-2021), Eminent biodiversity scholar
Katsunori Iha, Research Economist
Marta Antonelli, Ph.D., Food Systems Researcher
Veronica Arias, Climate and City Specialist
Corinne Hanson, Sustainable Business Specialist
Sebastián Navarro, Climate Ambassador and Envoy
Kristine Jiao, Communications
Mikel Evans, Research Analyst
Evan Neill, Research Analyst
Leo Wambersie, Research Analyst
Michael Wang, Front-end Designer
Melita Elmore, Sustainability Consultant, former Principal Consultant, British Standards Institution, Washington, D.C.
Yoshihiko Wada, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Ecological Economics, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, and Executive Director, Ecological Footprint Japan