Creating the World We Want: One Decade, 17 Goals now and Post-Pandemic

Márcia is founding director of corporate responsibility (CR) at RELX, a FTSE 15 information, analytics and events company with 33,000+ people and operations in 40 countries. Engaging colleagues throughout the business, Márcia works to ensure RELX’s extra-financial performance furthers competitive advantage and stakeholder confidence. She drives practice that ensures recognition for RELX as a CR leader: over the last year, RELX ranked 2nd in the S&P 1200 for environment, social and governance (ESG) as reported in the Financial Times; 1^st for ESG in the media and publishing sectors (and 17^th overall) among 12,000+ companies assessed by Sustainalytics; held a AAA ESG rating with MSCI; and was one of 36 LEAD companies of the United Nations Global Compact among approximately 10,000 corporate signatories.

She is Chair of the UN Global Compact Network UK; Chair of the Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Council of the Conference Board; and a founding member of the Board of the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens. She is founding director of London museum and educational facility Benjamin Franklin House and previously was special advisor to the American Chamber of Commerce (UK). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, she holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a PHD in Economic History from the London School of Economics. She is a Member of the British Empire (MBE), an honour awarded by the Queen, and lives in London with her husband and two boys.

Irina Bokova, born in Sofia (Bulgaria), has been two terms the Director- General of UNESCO from 2009 to 2917. Having graduated from Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Irina Bokova was a Fellow at the University of Maryland, Washington, and followed an executive program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. As Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova was actively engaged in the UN efforts to adopt Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development, particularly Goal 4 on “Achieving Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promoting Life-Long Learning for All”, as well as science and new technologies for sustainable development, protection of cultural and natural heritage and biodiversity, and gender equality. Since 2010 till 2017, Irina Bokova was vice-chair of the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, established by UNESCO and ITU (International Telecommunications Union), serving as a large platform for Governments, private sector and academia to support and promote connectivity and sustainable development. During the time of the work of the Broadband Commission, Bokova was chairing the Working Groups on Education and ICTs, and Gender and ICTs. Irina Bokova was also chairing from 2014 till 2017 the UN Secretary General’s Scientific Advisory Board on Sustainable Development with a focus on science-policy interface.

Irina Bokova was on the Forbes List of the world's most influential women for 2016. She has received academic distinctions from leading universities across the globe such as King's College, London, the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Paris Sud Saclay, France, Tongji University, Shanghai, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, among others. In 2020 was elected International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the category of Educational, Cultural and Non-profit Leadership.

Currently, she is Member of the Board of “Ban Ki Moon Centre for Global Citizens”, Member of the Senate of FIA and of the High Panel on Road Safety, Member of the Concordia Leadership Council, New York, visiting lecturer at the Paris School of International Affairs /PSIA/, SciencesPo, and at the University of Geneva, among others.

Cristian-Silviu Buşoi is a Member of the European Parliament and Chair of the Industry, Research and Energy Committee. He is also Member of the Delegation for Southeast Asia, as well as substitute Member of the Committee of Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and the Delegation for the Arab Peninsula.

Mr. Buşoi graduated Medicine from Carol Davila University in Bucharest, Law from Titu Maiorescu University in Bucharest, and Diplomacy from the Romanian Diplomatic Institute in Bucharest. His political career started in 1996 when, as a student, he became member of the National Liberal Party. Eight years later, he entered the Romanian Parliament and, in 2013, became President of the Romanian National Health Insurance House. Since 2007, he has been elected to the European Parliament for three consecutive terms.

Griet Cattaert is Head of Labour Rights at the United Nations Global Compact. She started in that position in May 2019 as a secondment from the International Labour Organization. She started working with the ILO in 2006, being based in Geneva, New York and Brussels. Her expertise is on social protection, migration and the promotion of labour standards and principles in the corporate world. Between 2016 and 2018 she worked as labour specialist for the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for International Migration to support the negotiation process that had led to the adoption of a Global Compact for Migration. She has also worked for almost 2 years a CSR Manager for JBC, the biggest Belgian fashion retail company.

YS Chi is an international businessman and a global thought leader in the publishing, education and information solutions industries. As Chairman of Elsevier, he works directly with key stakeholders in government, academia and industry to support over 30 million scientists, students and health information professionals. In his role as Director of Corporate Affairs for RELX, Elsevier’s parent company, he is responsible for government affairs, corporate communications and corporate responsibility across all four of the group’s market segments.

Based in London and New York, Chi travels extensively to engage with scientific research communities, deliver thought leadership on key trends and advise stakeholders, boards and groups across industries.  Chi serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Chi is also an independent director of Ingram Industries Inc. (Nashville, USA) and is involved in numerous educational, artistic and charitable organizations including Princeton University, the Ban Ki-Moon Foundation and the Korea Society.

Andy has been working in the field of sustainability for 15 years and joined Schneider Electric in 2010. He is currently leading the EMEA International Consulting Teams at Schneider Energy & Sustainability Services, a Schneider division aiming at providing consultancy, solution development and integration services to international corporations in the field of energy procurement, efficiency, resilience and sustainability. In particular, Andy and his team help pan-european corporations with defining and driving sustainability programs and supporting Green Energy Transition.

Monika Froehler is CEO of the Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens and is a passionate change maker, advocate, founder and speaker. She was entrusted to create the BKMC after working at the UN in Geneva, NY and Vienna, the EU, the Austrian Foreign Ministry and in field missions around the globe. She is passionate about the implementation of the SDGs and the Paris Climate Agreement. Throughout her career she managed to support hundreds of women, young people and communities all over the globe e.g. working in Africa and Latin America to ban landmines; working to improve hospital care in rural Central Asia and Africa; assisting in eco-friendly city planning in Asia and bettering the living conditions of women in the Middle East and West-Africa.

Sello Hatang is the Chief Executive of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Previously he was the Head of Information Communications and spokesperson for the South African Human Rights Commission. He participated in the post-1994 transformation of the National Archives, including providing archival support for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and is a former Director of the South African History Archive (SAHA) at Wits University.  He serves on the boards of the Open Democracy Advice Centre and Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution (CASAC). He is a member of the editorial team for Nelson Mandela’s book Conversations with Myself and co-editor of Nelson Mandela: By Himself: the Authorised Book of Quotations.  He is a 2014 Archbishop Tutu Fellow. He recently successfully summited Mount Kilimanjaro three times to help keep girl children in school.  Hatang was given the Keys to Florence, Italy, in acknowledgement of his leadership, and an honorary diploma from the city of Buenos Aires. 

Chris James is Senior Product Manager for SciVal, Elsevier’s primary research performance analyses and benchmarking platform. He is part of the team responsible for the design and development of new features to help their global customer base meet their research strategy challenges. He was responsible for the launch of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) in SciVal and is currently heading a partnership with a small group of institutions to improve the mapping of publications to each SDG.

Chris joined Elsevier in Amsterdam in 2004, where he has held roles in the company’s sales and product marketing teams. Prior to joining Elsevier, he worked at an engineering consultancy in the UK. Chris James holds a bachelor’s degree in Business from the University of Sunderland.

Lugano built his career delivering environmental sustainability initiatives within the property, media & publishing and airport management sectors. In 2019 he started a new chapter, setting up Loopcycle. Loopcycle’s goal is to break society’s take-make-waste production and consumption; creating accurate and traceable exchanges of used resources between organisations in order to allow circular products to scale.

Lugano is particularly interested in how businesses effectively align their people, processes and technologies to turn circular theory into practice. He is optimistic that lasting positive change can be achieved by creating impactful channels through which organisations can connect for a greater purpose – a belief that is core to Loopcycle’s philosophy.

Oduor Kevin is a public health expert, currently serving as the Chief Programs Officer for Stowelink Inc. Stowelink is a youth led organization whose single most focus is to address the burden of non-communicable disease. Oduor Kevin is the founder of INFO4FOOD, a social enterprise addressing post harvest losses using low tech machines (dryers). He is also an alumnus of YALI (Young African Leaders Initiative) founded by President Barack Obama.

Susan is currently serving as an adviser to several organizations including the UN World Food Programme, a social impact firm called 196, where she advises corporate clients on their strategies on the Sustainable Development Goals, and Goal 17 Partners, a not for profit organization that provides a platform for private-private collaboration toward sustainability, equality and accessibility. She has a 20-year long tenure working with the UN and the global policy-making community, most recently as Senior Vice President of the UN Foundation where she managed the organization’s unique relationship with the UN and led its presence in New York. Susan has worked with leaders from the UN, government, business, civil society and academia, brokering partnerships and building efforts to drive progress on global development, and is especially passionate about the transformative potential of the private sector as a force for realizing the Sustainable Development Goals. She is also active in her local community as a Board Member of Community Lifestyle in Hoboken, NJ and as an avid cyclist.

Elizabeth Pollitzer trained originally in Biophysics and obtained PhD in Information Science from the University of London (Kings’ College). She spent more than 20 years as researcher and lecturer in the Department of Computing at Imperial College. She is director of Portia, a not-for-profit organisation she co-founded in 2001 with several women scientists and engineers at Imperial College. Portia's aim is to use scientific evidence to advance understanding of how gender issues impact on science values, knowledge, and quality of outcomes. In 2011, she established the Gender Summit platform for dialogue, which brings scientists, gender experts, as well as policy- and decision makers in science endeavours to jointly examine new scientific evidence showing when, why, and how biological and/or socio-cultural differences between females and males influence quality of research outcomes, and decide where improvements are needed to remove biases and inequalities. Several regional Gender Summit platforms have been developed since then, including for Europe, Africa, Asia Pacific, North America, and Latin America. This has create a global Gender Summit Community of experts and practitioners, which is currently 7000 persons strong.

Mary leads the development of Loowatt’s work in global underserved markets. Since 2010 Mary has been supporting and investing in emerging market start-ups through roles at Ceniarth, the GSMA, and M-KOPA. She previously worked with GE Power Generation and Engineers Without Borders Canada. Mary holds an MBA from Oxford University and a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering from McGill University.

Akanksha Sharma is an internationally acclaimed International Development & Public Policy Specialist on a mission to empower people. She is a ‘Global Shaper of the World Economic Forum’, Writer and TEDx Speaker. She is a notable voice in the socio-economic development space and is noted amongst '100 Most Impactful CSR Leaders Globally' by World CSR Congress; 'Asia’s Top Sustainability Superwomen List of Honour' by CSRWorks International; ‘Young CSR Leader’ by India CSR and is also conferred with the “Sustainability Leadership Award” by World Sustainability Forum.

Sharma has more than a decade of experience in leadership roles at both large corporations and UN agencies, where she led change for development through strategic decision-making and policy discourse on CSR, sustainability, business responsibility, social entrepreneurship, and impact investments. She currently leads CSR and Sustainability for Sterlite Technologies and has worked with UNICEF and other large MNCs in the past. Her role with the corporates is to advise Boards on Responsible Business and Impact Investments through Sustainability & CSR along with developing organizational approaches to establish strategic partnerships for development ranging across public, private and civil society.

She has mentored non-profits and has served on several boards and policy committees. Sharma has worked extensively on international development issues such as poverty alleviation, health, education, environment, climate change, gender issues, post conflict development, governance and more in diverse regions of the world. After completing her Master’s in Business Administration, Sharma has done her specialization from Harvard Business School in CSR. She is a member of notable national/ international CSR and Sustainability Policy Making Forums of the UN, CII and others. She has been advocating for integrating CSR with SDGs with the UN and the Government.

Sharma is widely recognized for writing a Peace Series between India and Pakistan that was published in the Dawn, Pakistan. Later, she became a “Peace Ambassador” of an international organization, Postcards for Peace, a UK based organization for her contribution on issues related to peace and conflict. Besides, she is a regular writer for Forbes, Times of India, Economic Times, Huffington Post and Dailyo (India Today) amongst many others. She is a “Global Climate Force Ambassador” and was chosen to represent India on “International Expedition on Climate Change at Antarctica” in 2017.  She has been a notable speaker at various forums on issues related to Public Policy, Business and Government.

Annie Sparrow, MBBS, MRCP, FRACP, MPH, combines the clinical skills of an experienced practitioner with public-health expertise acquired from working in many of the world’s most devastating combat zones. As an Associate Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, she teaches human rights and humanitarian aid in complex emergencies. An Australian, Dr. Sparrow spent most of her first ten postgraduate years practicing pediatric critical care in London and her native Perth. She began focusing on refugee health and human rights after a brief stint in Afghanistan under Taliban control in 1999. 

Her first high-profile public-health effort was as a lead public advocate for refugees detained in punitive conditions in Australia. After completing a Masters in Public Health at Harvard, she joined Human Rights Watch (HRW) as its first researcher with medical training, addressing HIV and sexual violence in conflict in Chad and Sudan, and provided testimony to the International Criminal Court about the widespread crimes against humanity committed by the Sudanese government in Darfur. After HRW, she spent several years based in Nairobi working in various war-torn countries for the Emergency Response Team of Catholic Relief Services, and a further year as director of UNICEF’s malaria program in Somalia for the Global Fund against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Since 2013 her focus has been on the humanitarian and human rights catastrophe in Syria. In 2017, Dr. Sparrow was invited to join The Lancet Commission on Syria: Health in Syria as an expert researcher. 

She has travelled repeatedly to the Syrian border to document the health crisis and to train Syrian doctors and nurses in critical care, infectious diseases, malnutrition and siege medicine. She has published widely on the public health crisis, including the systematic assaults on doctors and targeting of medical care, the re-emergence of poliomyelitis, the use of chlorine in chemical attacks and as an indirect weapon of biological warfare, and on the collision of global health, conflict and the refugee crisis.

Alison has spent over 20 years as a water and sanitation economist for  DFID, UNICEF, JBIC, World Bank and UNESCO. Worked in India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Gambia, South Africa.  Alison established her skills in the WASH field focusing on financial sustainability and  increasingly frustrated with the failure of conventional WASH programmes to provide sustainable access to water, Alison co-founded eWATER Services  which provides 24/7 affordable, sustainable water using IOT connected smart meters. eWATERservices fixes and installs new systems  and through accountable low cost revenue collection the business uses locally trained technicians to ensure  water supply systems are maintained and operated successfully.

Water costs $3-5 per person per year to the 150,000 customers in Tanzania, Ghana and Gambia.  230 million litres of water has been dispensed, and every drop tracked.  Winners of 2018 Global Mobile Technology Award (GLOMO) for "Outstanding Mobile Contribution to the UN SDG's",  2019 UK Tech Awards Innovation & Sustainability,  2019 NFC for Good Winners. Publications  include “Designing for Demand” and “A Streamlined Approach to Willingness to Pay Surveys ”

Alison is currently CEO of eWATERservices responsible for overall management and strategic leadership.

One of the RELX businesses, LexisNexis Legal & Professional is a leading provider of information analytics to law firms, corporations, governments, and academic institutions. Globally, the company serves customers in over 175 countries and employs over 10,0000 people. In Malaysia, the Malayan Law Journal has been reporting case law since 1932 and continues to provide premier legal content in multiple platforms serving the legal profession.

Gaythri is responsible for leading the Southeast Asia business in the development and execution of strategies to deliver innovative information analytics solutions to customers in helping them increase productivity and improve decision-making outcomes. She is also driving growth in the ASEAN region, working with partners across the multiple jurisdictions to enable access to laws and analytical tools. She speaks frequently on the topics of rule of law, legal technologies, artificial intelligence, digital transformations, and technological innovation at various events and platforms across the region.  

Gaythri is legally trained and extremely passionate about the rule of law. She is a big believer in combining technology and the law to empower individuals for the betterment of society. She is a founding member of the Businesses for the Rule of Law (B4ROL) initiative by the United Nations Global Compact to support the growth of developing countries by enabling the business community to engender legal reform, transparency and rule of law. She has also led various programs and initiatives on capacity building, access to laws and justice, legal reform and education in Sri Lanka, Maldives, South Africa, Myanmar, to name a few.

Dr. Shimrit Perkol-Finkel is the co-founder and CEO of ECOncrete Tech Ltd, a world leader in bio-enhancing concrete technologies, chosen as one of TIME Magazine 100 Best Inventions in 2019. Shimrit has over 20 years of experience in Marine Biology and Ecology, in over 30 counties, specializing in ecological enhancement of urban marine habitats and is considered a world expert in ecological engineering. Shimrit won the prestigious EU Women Innovators award, chosen as Forward Actor of the Year in the 2019 GreenTech Festival, and was noted as one of Fast Company’s 2019 top 100 Most Creative People in Business.

Shimrit holds a B.Sc. in Life Sciences, M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Zoology (Tel-Aviv University), Post-Doc (University of Bologna) - EU Marie Curie Fellow.