Iain Watt

Now one of Forum’s old-timers (I’ve been here since 2005) I sit within Forum’s Energy Team, where I currently lead our Farm Power project – articulating the role that farms could and should be playing in the energy system (and hopefully making it much easier for farmers and rural communities alike to invest in sustainable energy systems).

I’m also involved in the Living North Sea Initiative – which is exploring whether a change in the decommissioning regime in the North Sea might not only be ecologically preferable, but might also unleash the funding to start managing the North Sea ecosystem in a sustainable manner. Controversial, complex, and incredibly interesting stuff!

I’ve also been helping to mould Forum’s evolving interest in the bioeconomy and land governance – thinking through how we might ensure that our finite planet provides us with all the things we might want (from food through energy and materials and biodiversity and ecosystem services and everything else). Watch this space…

My main interest remains climate change, however. I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on offsetting and carbon neutrality – and their respective roles in corporate climate strategy – but I’m increasingly interested in getting companies to think through, and act upon, the strategic risks that climate change poses to their business model. I want Forum’s corporate Partners – and the business community more broadly – to not only do their bit, but to become much more vocal advocates for change (and to tackle head-on the pernicious and persistent meme that action on climate is bad for business).

Prior to coming to Forum, I spent 7 years working for Ceres in the US where I focused on corporate accountability and co-wrote the first two editions of the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Reporting Guidelines.

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