Who we are

Jim Snabe leads innovative companies accelerating the decarbonization of the world. He is the chairman of German manufacturing conglomerate Siemens and Swedish battery developer Northvolt. He has 25 years of experience in the technology industry, having started at the enterprise software company SAP AG in 1990.‍

Snabe is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Board of Trustees, an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School and the former chairman of Danish shipping company Maersk. He has co-authored two books on tech and leadership: Dreams and Details and Tech For Life: Putting Trust Back in Technology.

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Between 2019 and 2021, Gonzalo was one of two United Nations High Level Climate Action Champions for the annual COP conference. Currently he is Chair of the advisory board for the Climate Champions Team. Previously, he co-founded and led TriCiclos, one of the most recognised Latin American companies in circular economy. He also co-founded the global movement of Certified B Corps.

Gonzalo is co-leader of Manuia, a strategic consulting firm founded by TriCiclos, dedicated to helping companies incorporate ESG. He is a board member at the Global Foodbanking Network. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II awarded Gonzalo the Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of Saint Michael and Saint George (CMG) in 2022.

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Habiba Ahut Daggash is an Associate with the Africa Energy Program at RMI, where she is working to advance productive uses of electricity in agricultural processing in rural communities in Nigeria. She has a PhD in energy systems modeling from Imperial College London. Her research focuses on understanding how electricity systems need to transition to deliver the Paris Agreement targets, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. She has co-authored several books on carbon removal technologies and widely published journal articles on clean energy transitions in the power and transport sectors. 

Habiba is a Fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub and an advisory committee member for USAID’s Strengthening Civic Advocacy and Local Engagement (SCALE) project in Nigeria. Prior to RMI, she was a management consultant at BCG’s Lagos office and chaired the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) Future Energy Leaders Forum.

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Joshua Amponsen is a Ghanaian climate activist and Co-Director of the new Youth Climate Justice Fund initiative. He is the former Climate Lead at the Office of the UN Secretary General’s Envoy on Youth. He has over 8 years of experience working with young people on Climate Action, Disaster Risk, and Resilience Building.

He founded Green Africa Youth Organization (GAYO), served as a member of the IRENA Global Council on Enabling Youth Action for SDG 7, and has been an Adaptation Fellow at the Global Center on Adaptation(GCA). In the past two years, Joshua has focused on supporting grassroot youth-led organizations and is continuously engaged in the advocacy to shift climate philanthropy to youth and locally-led organizations. He has initiated locally-led projects like the Water for Adaptation, and Sustainable Communities Project in sub-Saharan Africa which is creating jobs for over 100 people and he is championing the establishment of Youth Climate Councils across the Global South.

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Manish Bhardwaj is the co-founder and CEO of Innovators in Health whose mission is to deliver world-class healthcare to the rural poor in India. He also directs a program to amplify the societal impact of the humanities and social sciences at Princeton University's Keller Center, where he was previously the James Wei Visiting Professor. 

‍Prior to Innovators, Manish was a co-founder and Chief Architect at Engim Inc., a private, venture-backed wireless semiconductor startup. He is a Fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from where he received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering. He is a recipient of MIT's Graduate Student Council Teaching Award.

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Nigel Topping is the UN High-Level Climate Action Champion for COP26, appointed by the UK Prime Minister in January 2020. His role involves strengthening collaboration and driving action from businesses, investors, organizations, cities and regions on climate change.

Nigel was most recently CEO of We Mean Business, a coalition of businesses working to accelerate the transition to a zero-carbon economy. Prior to that, he was executive director of the Carbon Disclosure Project, following an 18-year career in the private sector.

Olivia Lazard is a fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of climate, the transition ushered by climate change, and the risks of conflict and fragility associated with climate change and environmental collapse.

Olivia is an environmental peacemaking and mediation practitioner as well as a researcher. She has over twelve years of experience in the peacemaking sector at field and policy levels. With an original specialization in the political economy of conflicts, she has worked for various NGOs, the UN, the EU, and donor states in the Middle East, Latin America, Sub-Saharan and North Africa, and parts of Asia. In her fieldwork, she has explored how globalization and the international political economy shaped patterns of violence and vulnerability as well as formed new types of conflict systems that our international governance architecture has difficulty tackling with agility. There she came to observe how the plundering of ecosystems feeds conflict systems across the world and contributes to climate disruptions. 

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Omnia El Omrani is the Climate Change and Health Policy Fellow at Imperial College London and one of the first Health Envoys for the 28th UN Climate Conference (COP28). She was the first official Youth Envoy for the President of COP27 and the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs. She is a medical doctor with multiple roles as a Commissioner at the Lancet Commissions on Sustainable Healthcare, Prevention of Viral Spillover and Post-COVID Population Health, a member of the first Youth Sounding Board of the European Union DG-INTPA, an associate at Women Leaders for Planetary Health, and a member of the UNICEF-Az Youth Leaders Program and New York Times Generation Climate Cohort. Fast Company ME recognized her as one of the 35 Most Creative People in Business in 2023. She was selected as one of the 2023 Women of the Future, 50 Rising Stars in ESG.

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Rayne Sullivan is a climate technologist, legal scholar, and recognized “leader saving our planet” working on accelerating private sector investment for biodiversity, equitable artificial intelligence, island innovations, and ocean technology. He is the founder of SEASTORIA, a platform dedicated to driving a nature-positive economy, underpinned by regenerative Indigenous science.

In international climate policy, Rayne served as the United Nations Youth4Climate Delegate for the United States, co-chaired the Youth Policy Advisory Council at the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, and advised the Government of Palau on oceans and innovation during COP27 and COP28.

At Stanford University, Rayne supported the Doerr School of Sustainability’s leadership team in government partnership meetings, worked on privacy and AI-remote sensing at the RegLab, and researched climate AI as a fellow at the Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. He holds a JD from Stanford Law School, a MSc from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Georgetown University.

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Riddhima Yadav has worked at the intersection of the public-private sectors on climate.  She was a founding team member of the Sustainable Finance Group at Goldman Sachs and has served as a climate fellow for Sec. John Kerry. She currently works on global climate finance initiatives. Riddhima holds a BA in Ethics, Politics and Economics from Yale University and is a fellow at The Aspen Institute and the Economic Club of New York. Riddhima first started working on environmental issues as a teenage founder of a non-profit in India. She was named Most Inspiring Women in Climate by The Climate Group. 

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