Speakers

Shardul Agrawala

Dr. Shardul Agrawala is Head of the Environment and Economy Integration Division at the OECD Environment Directorate. He leads the Directorate’s work on resource productivity and circular economy, economic-environmental modelling, empirical analysis, and trade and environment. At the OECD since 2002, Dr. Agrawala has served in a number of positions, including as Senior Economist Climate Change, Co-ordinator of the OECD wide initiative on New Approaches to Economic Challenges, and Senior Advisor to the OECD Secretary General. He has published extensively and led teams of experts as Co-ordinating Lead Author (CLA) for the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and currently serves on the Science Advisory Panel of the Climate Change and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC). Dr. Agrawala received his PhD from Princeton University and has previously held research positions at Princeton University, Harvard University and Columbia University and at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).

Riina Antikainen

Riina Antikainen (Ph.D) is the Director of Programme for Sustainable Circular Economy at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), which is a multidisciplinary research and expert institute with an aim to solve society's most burning questions that have an impact on the environment. Riina’s expertise include circular, green and bio-economies, sustainable use of natural resources and life cycle thinking. She co-chairs in the European Environment Agencies (EPA) network’s IG Green and Circular Economy.

Turning waste into secondary materials – lessons learned from 9 European cases.

Rachna Arora

Dr. Rachna Arora is working as a Deputy Team Leader in the Resource Efficiency project of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH funded by the European Union on issues related to fostering resource efficiency and secondary resource utilization. She has been working with GIZ since 2007 under the bilateral projects, combi-finance projects of the European Commission and the partnership projects with the private sector with relevant Ministries and government departments. She has been supporting the Government of India (GoI) on policy formulation and its implementation particularly on electronic waste management, resource efficiency, Construction and demolition wastes, end of life vehicles and circular economy. She is a doctorate degree in environmental chemistry from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee. She is a member of the Task Force and Inter-departmental committee set up by Niti Aayog (Policy think tank, GoI) on Resource Efficiency strategy implementation in India. She is also a part of the Research and Development (R&D) committee set up by the Department of Information Technology and Communication (DeiTY), GoI on electronic waste management.

Ugo Bardi

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome, chief editor of the Springer journal “Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality,” and member of several international scientific organization. He is active in the dissemination of scientific results in sustainability and climate science on the blog “Cassandra' Legacy”. He is the author of numerous papers on sustainability and of the recent books “The Limits to Growth Revisited” (Springer 2011), “Extracted – how the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet” (Chelsea Green, 2014), and “The Seneca Effect” (Springer 2017). His books have been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Rumania.

The Long Term Cycle of Mineral Resources: Is a Completely Circular Economy Possible?

Rolf Buschmann

BUND, Germany

Hans Bruyninckx

Hans Bruyninckx is the Executive Director of the European Environment Agency since 1 June, 2013. In 1996 Dr Bruyninckx completed a PhD in international environmental politics at Colorado State University. Until his appointment at the EEA, he was professor of environmental politics and director of the HIVA Research Institute in Belgium, a policy-oriented research institute associated with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Over the last 20 years, he has conducted research in areas including environmental politics, climate change and sustainable development. He has taught global environmental politics and global environmental governance in relation to the European Union (EU), publishing extensively on EU environmental policies and its role as an actor in global environmental governance. Throughout his career Dr Bruyninckx has worked with governmental agencies, civil society and businesses, often in an advisory role.

A European perspective on the resource – climate nexus.

Lieze Cloots

Lieze Cloots is head International Policy at OVAM, the Public Waste Agency of Flanders. She is Belgian EU pilot on the EU circular economy Actionplan and member of the coordination group for the EU CE Stakeholderplatform. Previously Lieze Cloots was policy director at the federation of environment and nature NGO’s in Flanders and legal advisor in the cabinet of the federal Minister of Environment. She has a 20 year experience in environment and sustainability policies at international and national level. She holds a Master in Law at Catholic Universtity of Leuven and a Master in European Law at the Université de Liege.

B2B circular procurement: a gamechanger in consumerbehavior.

Conny Czymoch

Conny Czymoch is an independent international moderator and journalist. A former anchorwoman for Phoenix tv, Germany, she has been engaged in conference moderation for the EU, diverse German ministries, international organisations and corporations as well as NGOs for more than two decades. Topics such as climate change, resource efficiency, sustainability, the global goals, labour and supply chain issues as well as digitization and social responsibility are at the core of her competence. She moderated a number of high level meetings in the G20 Resource Efficiency Dialogue, both for the German and the Argentinian Presidency, and for the IRP.

Bas de Leeuw

Bas de Leeuw is Managing Director of the World Resources Forum, known for its flagship conferences and multistakeholder projects on circular economy, lifestyles, recycling, e-waste and raw material governance,. Bas has initiated and managed sustainable consumption and production initiatives as well as the International Resource Panel at UN Environment, has worked as national expert for the OECD on sustainable consumption policies and worked on energy and environmental policies for the Dutch government. He is a Dutch economist from the Rotterdam Erasmus University and is a full member of the Club of Rome.

The Circular Economy – What if Consumers would just do it?

Regina Maria Dube

Dr. Regina Dube is Director General for Water Management and Resource Conservation at the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. Prior to joining the Federal Ministry in July 2018, Dr. Dube headed the Agency for Air Pollution Control and Industrial Plants (Amt für Immissionsschutz und Betriebe) of the city-state of Hamburg and served for many years in leading positions in Hamburg’s Agency for Environmental Protection and Energy. Dr. Dube was program manager for GIZ - Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit in India from 2008 until 2015. She studied environmental engineering at Technische Universität Berlin and holds a Ph.D. in engineering.

Branko Dunjic

Director of the Centre and Chief Technical Advisor in UNIDO. Mr. Dunjić has PhD in chemical engineering, with specialization on polymeric materials. He worked at the University of Belgrade, teaching polymer chemistry, and then joined industry where he worked as R&D manager, than as a manager of one production unit. Since 2007 he is managing Cleaner Production Centre in Serbia, established in the frame of a UNIDO-sponsored project. The Centre successfully performed over 100 RECP assessments in companies, helping to its clients to save in average 100,000 EUR/year.

Resource Efficiency in Practice - Examples from Serbia

Brendan Edgerton

Brendan is the Director of Circular Economy at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a global, CEO-led organization of over 200 companies working together to accelerate the transition to a sustainable world. Since joining WBCSD in Geneva in 2015, Brendan has contributed to over 10 publications on the circular economy. Brendan co-developed and launched Factor10, WBCSD’s circular economy program. Factor10 now has 35 members, spanning across 16 industries and responsible for over USD $1.4 trillion in annual turnover. Brendan has an MBA from the Yale School of Management, a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and a bachelor’s in Ecological Design from the University of California Santa Cruz.

The existing concepts (i.e. circular economy, bioeconomy, etc.) for a circular Europe are more than sufficient. The challenge lies not in the concepts but in bringing them to life. We now need to focus on accelerating implementation and scaling up of these concepts through effective policy, investments in new technologies and business models and making a healthier, happier and sustainable lifestyle more aspirational.

Paul Ekins

Paul Ekins has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of London and is Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy and Director of the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources at University College London. He is a member of UNEP’s International Resource Panel (IRP), and was the lead author of the IRP’s report on resource efficiency commissioned by the G7 governments in 2015 and published in 2017.

Klaus Fichter

Prof. Dr. Klaus Fichter is the founder and director of the Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability. He is adjunct Professor of Innovation Management and Sustainability at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany, and is on the board of directors of the Oldenburg Center for Sustainability Economics and Management (CENTOS). He is head of graduate degree programs in innovation management and sustainable entrepreneurship. Professor Fichter is scientific director of the regional Network for innovation and entrepreneurship in times of climate change (NIK) and Chair of the Special Interest Group “Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation” of the FGF network of entrepreneurship research, education and policy (the largest network of entrepreneurship and innovation researchers in German-speaking Europe.

Environmental Business Innovation: Facts and Drivers

Maja Göpel

Prof. Dr. Maja Göpel is Secretary General of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, an interdisciplinary and independent body working on flagship reports and policy briefs around transformations towards sustainability. Next to the public speaking, engagement and networking tasks this role allows her to continue the research focus she had developed as the Head of Berlin Office of the Wuppertal Institut: system transformations for sustainable development and new prosperity models with an emphasis on the role of paradigm shifts as strategic leverage points, summarized in her 2016 book The Great Mindshift: How a Need a New Economic Paradigm and Sustainability Transformations Go Hand in Hand (Springer). Maja Göpel is a transdisciplinary scientivist that formerly helped start up the World Future Council, created its Future Policy Award and “Future Justice” programme promoting interests of future generations in economy and policy at EU and UN level. She is a member of the Club of Rome and the Balaton Group, serves on several boards - and in particular as the mother of 2 girls.

Aldert Hanemaaijer

Aldert Hanemaaijer is Program Manager Green and Circular Economy at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. Currently he works on a measuring and steering system for the circular economy for policy makers. PBL is the national institute for strategic policy analysis in the fields of the environment, nature and spatial planning.

How to measure progress towards a circular economy.

Dirk Helbing

The work of Prof Helbing has been widely cited in the media and academia and he has written more than 10 papers in Nature, Science and PNAS. In 2012, he won the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative, he helped to further develop disciplines such as data science, computational social science, and global systems science in Europe.This work resulted in the establishment of the Nervousnet Platform, a smartphone app enabling users to share data to be used to achieve scientific and social goals. Helbing worked for the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. He was elected member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and now belongs to the External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He sits in the Boards of the Global Brain Institute in Brussels and the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva. He is also involved in the activities of "Staatslabor" (a Swiss government science initiative) as well as the establishment of the Blockchain [X] initiative and the Blockchain Lab in Delft. He is a member of a Swiss governmental advisory group on the societal impact of digitization.

Dominic Hogg

Dominic is Chairman of Eunomia Research & Consulting, where he leads the company’s work on policy development. As well as having extensive experience of environmental taxes, he has led a projects supporting the development of a circular economy in the EU, including revisions of the waste Directives, and the proposed Directive on single-use plastics.

Environmental Taxes and Charges: Their Relevance for Resources.

Maija Itkonen

Maija Itkonen is an entrepreneur, innovator, industrial designer and brand lover. She founded her first company PowerKiss in 2008 and built it until it was acquired by US-Israeli Powermat in 2013. After the merger Maija worked as design and brand head at Powermat. In 2015 she co-founded Gold&Green Foods, the company behind the phenomenal success story of the “perfect protein food” platform and its first product Pulled Oats. Pulled Oats is a new kind of meat alternative based on the Nordic superfood oats, built around the team’s unique scientific knowledge and design thinking under Maija’s leadership. In August 2016 the Paulig Group acquired 51% of Gold&Green. Maija remains as the CEO of the company.

Fighting the climate change with food tech - Story of Gold&Green

Klaus Jacob

Dr. Klaus Jacob is research director of the Environmental Policy Research Centre at Freie Universität Berlin. He conducts comparative analysis of environmental policies. He is coordinator of the project Policies for resource efficiency.

Pawel Kazmierczyk

Pawel Kazmierczyk is a project manager responsible for work on resource efficiency and material flows at the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen. He is currently coordinating work on an overview of national resource efficiency and circular economy policies in 32 European countries. Prior to joining the EEA in 2002, Pawel worked on cleaner production programs in Latin America (with UNIDO) and on business and environment projects in central and eastern Europe (at the REC). Polish by nationality, Pawel holds degrees in environmental engineering from Poland, in environmental management from the Netherlands, and in international relations and economics from the United States.

Overview of national policy initiatives on resource efficiency and circular economy in Europe.

Shigemoto Kajihara

President of Japan Waste Research Foundation. Former Vice-Minister for Global Environmental Affairs, Ministry of Environment of Japan. He was a government official at Ministry of the Environment of Japan since 1979 and occupied different management positions for climate change and waste management.

Importance of developing a common vison for resource efficient society and circular economy

Maria Krautzberger

Maria Krautzberger heads the German Federal Environment Agency (UBA) since May 2014. Ms Krautzberger, born in Upper Bavaria and a graduate of administrative sciences, served as Permanent Secretary in the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment from 1999 to 2011.

Resource conservation is a joint task of the international community. Therefore we need an international convention on the protection of natural resources and we should lay the groundwork for it soon.

Sari Laine

Sari Laine works as a sustainable lifestyle specialist in future think-and-do-tank Sitra, in Finland. The sustainable lifestyle team at Sitra has a two-year project where they are studying Finnish consuming behaviors and trying out new ways to change how Finns are living their lives. Sari’s main responsibility has been understanding the motives of Finns to do consumer decisions as well as using that knowledge with non-profit organisations which are creating solutions to engage more people into sustainable lifestyle.

Harry Lehmann

A physicist, Dr. Harry Lehmann has been General Director of Division I “Environmental Planning and Sustainability Strategies” of the German Federal Environment Agency since 2004. He is the President of the Factor X Club for resource productivity and sustainable use of natural resources.

Resource conservation is the central element of sustainability.

Carola Maggiulli

Carola Maggiulli has been an EU Commission official for almost 30 years and is head of the sector in charge of energy taxation and other environmental taxes in the Directorate General dealing with taxation. As a senior economist she is specialized in public economics as well as financial and monetary economics. She has been working on energy and environmental taxation during the last decade. Before that she was involved in direct taxation dossiers (corporate taxation (CCCTB) and tax competition) for ten years. Ms Maggiulli regularly gives taxation seminars at various Universities (Louvain, Bologna, Metz) and is the author of a number of articles. The subject of environmental taxation and the need to coordinate this policy at the EU level in order to set relevant priorities in terms of sustainable growth, more resource efficient, greener and more competitive economy is at the core of the challenges that Europe is facing for the following decade, in economic, environmental and social areas.

Jaana Merisaar

The task of the Ministry of the Environment of Estonia is to create such prerequisites and conditions which ensure us and the following generations diverse nature and clean living environment as well as the sustainable use of natural resources. In the context of the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) of the European Union of 2014 to 2020, Estonia has decided to support resource efficient solutions with over 100 million EUR in investments. Our resource efficiency measure is directed mostly towards SMEs in the manufacturing industry. As the Project Manager of this measure I coordinate and organize conferences, seminars and trainings to raise awareness of the companies and to train resource efficiency specialists.

Bruno Oberle

Bruno Oberle has explored and shaped the interface between environmental policy, economic development and social balance from the perspective of the state regulator, as an entrepreneur and as a scientist. He has worked on both sectoral and national issues as well as working at the highest level of international policy-making. He studied Environmental, Economics and Mediation at ETH Zurich and completed his doctorate. He founded and led companies in the field of environmental consulting and environmental management. In 1999 he was appointed Deputy Director of the Federal Office for the Environment, Forests and Landscape and in 2005 appointed Director of the newly created Federal Office for the Environment. Until 2015, as State Secretary for the Environment, he also represented Switzerland in international institutions and international negotiations. On several occasions he took on mediation tasks, in particular with regard to topics related to the financing of international programms. Since 2016, Bruno Oberle has been a professor for "Green Economy and Resource Governance" at EPFL. He also heads the IRGC, International Risk Governance Center of the same university. In addition to his full-time duties, Bruno Oberle acts both as an advisor and as a director in several organizations and companies and conveys his experiences in lectures, courses and writings.

Ines Oehme

Ines Oehme (PhD) works for the German Environment Agency since 2006 and is head of the section Product Responsibility since 2018. The presentation deals with her former workfield, which covered the implementation of the ecodesign directive, product life time and strategies against obsolescence. The Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) is Germany’s central environmental authority. It provides scientific based policy advice for example in the fields of climate protection, chemicals, products and technology and environmental protection of water, air and soil.

NOTE on Service Life of Products Countering Obsolescence

Janez Potočnik

Janez Potočnik is co-chair of the IRP. He has held many important positions and has extensive experience in the realm of environment, economics and European Affairs. In September 2013 he received the United Nation's Champions of the Earth Award.

The reasons why we need more global cooperation in the area of resource management, how that is linked to the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals and how we could better support global collaboration in the area of resource management in the political and economic turmoil we are facing.

Bettina Rechenberg

Dr. Bettina Rechenberg works as Director General of division “Sustainable Production and Products, Waste management” at the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt). She studied biology and has worked at the Umweltbundesamt since 1992 gaining experiences in chemical safety, water protection, sustainable production, resource conservation and material cycles. She is dealing with the analysis of environmental effects linked to raw material extraction, industrial production, consumption and waste management und is searching for sustainable and practicable solutions.

Greening the economy is necessary, not only for the good of the environment and human beings, but also with respect to long term economic growth. We therefore need to become greener and more resource efficient with regards to natural resources to stay within the ecological boundaries. Transition towards circular economy is one part of wider overall transition to green economy - a circular economy is aiming at "closing the loop" and using resources in a more sustainable way.

Eva Revilla

Eva Revilla is economist and works as policy officer in the unit for Advanced Technologies, Clusters and Social Economy in the Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs at the European Commission. Concretely, she works on promotion and support of international cluster cooperation and SMEs access to global value chains, with a particular focus on resource efficiency and circular economy. She has previously worked on macroeconomics at the University of Limerick, as international cooperation officer for Latin America and on SME policy at the European Commission.

Hubert Rhomberg

Master Builder & Civil Engineer DI Hubert Rhomberg is Managing Director of Rhomberg Holding GmbH and - now in the fourth generation - in charge of the internationally active Rhomberg Group, which has its headquarters in Bregenz, Austria. The name Rhomberg stands for sustainable building as much as for sustainable mobility and resource productivity. Following his holistic approach, the three divisions Construction, Railway Technology and Resources have not only established sustainability as a principle but continue to set standards. After graduating in engineering at Vienna Technical University Hubert Rhomberg worked for the construction company Strabag in Linz and Vienna for three years before, in 1998, joining his family's company in his role as Manager of the Civil Engineering department and in charge of developing the Railway Technology division. In addition, he supplemented his practical entrepreneurial knowledge by taking a postgraduate course in Company Management at the well known University of St. Gallen. Hubert Rhomberg extends his range of activities by actively promoting research projects (BRIX, House of the Future, LifeCycleTower) and giving public lectures on the subjects Resource Productivity, Mobility and Sustainable Company Management. In 2015 he published his book “Bauen 4.0 – From the Ego to the Lego principle”.

No one alone knows as much as all of us together.

Pavel Růžička

Pavel Ruzicka is an experienced environmental expert who focuses on areas of industrial ecology, resource efficiency, sustainable consumption and production and voluntary instruments. He works as a project manager in ENVIROS, which is Prague-based consulting company providing assistance mainly in the field of energy, environmental and business consultancy.

Resource Efficiency Policy and its Implementation in the Czech Republic.

Astrid Schomaker

Astrid Schomaker is Director for Global Sustainable Development at the European Commission's Directorate General for the Environment. Her portfolio includes international relations, international resource efficiency, and environment policy strategy, including the alignment of environment policy with the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. A lawyer by training, she joined the European Commission in 1992 where she held various posts in the external affairs department, before moving to the Environment Department in 2004 where she lead work on a variety of issues including, chemicals, oceans and water industry as well as overall coordination and communication. She took up her present position in July 2016.

Fight complacency and go global.

Svenja Schulze

In March 2018, Svenja Schulze took up office as Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety of Germany. In 2010, she was appointed Minister for Innovation, Science and Research in North Rhine-Westphalia; she held this position until 2017. She attended the Ruhr University-Bochum and graduated in German studies and political science.

Resource efficiency: Needed for European and German environment and economy.

Tracey Spack

Dr. Tracey Spack is the Director of the Products Division in the Environmental Protection Branch at Environment and Climate Change Canada. Her division is responsible for the development and administration of a number of regulations and other tools aimed at risk managing the use of toxic substances in products and some industrial processes including mercury, phosphorus, volatile organic compounds, and plastic microbeads. Her division supports Canada’s work on the Minimata and Stockholm Conventions and she represents the Western Europe and Others Group on the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management’s Chemicals in Products Steering Group. Tracey has worked for the Canadian federal government for over 15 years in the area of health and the environment. She has a PhD in medical anthropology from the University of Alberta.

Perspectives of a Resource Rich Country in the Drive for a more Resource Efficient World.

Sangwon Suh

Sangwon Suh is a professor in industrial ecology and the director of the CLiCC Program, an EPA-funded university-industry partnership on chemicals' environmental and human health impacts. He was trained as an environmental engineer and earned his PhD in industrial ecology at the Leiden University in the Netherlands. Professor Suh's research focuses on the interface between technologies and the environment. He studies the impacts of interactions between them, namely exchanges of resources, chemicals, and wastes, as well as the policy instruments that govern such interactions. He contributed to the development of the analytical foundations of life cycle assessment (LCA) and its integration with economic input-output analysis, known as hybrid approach. His current research attempts to understand the implications of international sourcing on the environment and how government interventions may affect the adoption of low-carbon technologies.

Aida Szilagyi

President of the National Centre for Sustainable Production and Consumption, Aida Szilagyi worked in last 20 years in different technical, management and advisory roles, promoting, educating and supporting adoption of resource efficiency, waste management, eco-innovation and circular economy in multiple sectors. She is responsible for ensuring the organization’s activities are compliant and in furtherance of its mission and for developing, implementing, monitoring, and assessing the organization’s projects.

Markus Terho

Markus Terho is a corporate responsibility veteran, with over two decades in the industry. He has held several notable positions, among them, he has served as the sustainability chief at Nokia. There he has managed global corporate responsibility activities, environmental and social responsibility, social investment portfolios as well as disaster relief and charity donations. In his current role, at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, he leads the Sustainable Everyday Life project, that promotes the change towards a more sustainable life in two ways: by inspiring individuals to make sustainable choices in their everyday life and by helping companies develop competitive sustainable products and services.

Vanessa Timmer

Dr. Vanessa Timmer is the Executive Director of One Earth, a Vancouver, Canada-based environmental ‘think and do tank’ creating and imagining sustainable ways of living in cities and around the world. One Earth collaborates with partners to transform how people live their lives – what they need, what they consume and produce, and what they aspire to – enabling everyone to live good quality of lives within their fair share of our planet’s resources.

Transforming sustainable daily living: new solutions for the Circular Economy.

Herwig Unnerstall

Herwig Unnerstall (PhD) is lawyer and philosopher. He works for the German Environment Agency since 2015 and deals there with questions of climate and energy law as well as questions of consumer and product law. He has also expertise in questions of intergenera¬tio-nal justice and in legal questions of water resources management and nature conservation. The Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) is Germany’s central environmental authority. It provides scientific based policy advice for example in the fields of climate protection, chemicals, products and technology and environmental protection of water, air and soil.

NOTE on Service Life of Products Countering Obsolescence

Karmenu Vella

Karmenu Vella is the European Commissioner for Environment, Fisheries and Maritime Affairs. He was born in Malta on June 1950. Mr Vella graduated in Architecture and Civil Engineering, and later obtained a Master of Science in Tourism Management from University of Sheffield. He was first elected to Parliament in 1976 and continued to be was re-elected in the elections that followed for nine consecutive times. During his political career he has been appointed Minister for Public Works, Minister for Industry and Minister for Tourism twice. Mr Vella had also held various senior posts in the private sector.

Martin Vogt

Dr. Martin Vogt studied physics at Humboldt-Universität Berlin and received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge. From 2004 to 2006 he worked as a postdoc at Harvard University. From 2007 to 2012 he worked as a technology consultant at VDI Technologiezentrum GmbH in Düsseldorf, where he coordinated the German government's National Contact Point for Nanotechnology for the EU Research Framework Programme. Dr. Vogt then held a management position at VDI Zentrum Ressourceneffizienz GmbH (VDI ZRE), where he has been Managing Director since October 2013.

Jeremy Wates

Short personal description: Jeremy Wates is the Secretary General of the European Environmental Bureau, Europe’s largest federation of environmental citizens’ organizations, comprising over 140 member organizations from more than 30 European countries with a combined membership of some thirty million environmentally concerned citizens.

Making sustainable resource use the new normal.

Klaus Wiesen

Klaus Wiesen is an expert in sustainability assessment. In 2017 he co-founded the startup sustainabill. With the sustainabill cloud platform companies can discover their complete supply chain and obtain extensive insights into supply risks and sustainability. Before co-founding sustainabill, he was active as a project coordinator for the Wuppertal Institute.

Supply Chain Transparency as a driver for resource efficient products.

Helga Weisz

Helga Weisz is co-chair of the research domain ‘Transdisciplinary Concepts & Methods’ at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Potsdam, Germany and professor of Industrial Ecology and Climate Change at Humboldt-University Berlin. Previous positions include assistant and associate professor at the Institute of Social Ecology, Vienna, and guest professorships at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, University St. Gallen, and Yale University. Helga Weisz graduated in Microbiology (Mag.rer.nat., University Vienna, 1995), received a doctoral degree in Cultural Studies (Dr. phil., Humboldt-University Berlin, 2002) and habilitated in Social Ecology (venia docendi, Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt, 2006). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on societal metabolism, i.e. the exchange of energy and materials between human societies and their natural environments. The research comprises quantitative empirical analyses of historical socio-metabolic transitions at global, national and urban scales in its implications for wellbeing, inequality and power relations with sociological systems theory. Areas of specialization are: industrial and urban metabolism, material and energy flow analysis, environmental indicators, complex network analysis, environmentally extended input-output analysis, society nature co-evolution, environmental history, and climate impacts. Among many other science community services, Helga is a member of the governing board of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), located in Laxenburg, Austria, of the steering committee of NRP 73 "Sustainable Economy", commissioned by the Swiss National Science Foundation, of UNEP’s International Resource Panel and of the Board of the World Resources Forum.