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Green Economy: Opportunities for Jobs, Growth and Innovation in Europe
Conference on 5 June 2015, Brussels
List of Speakers
Laura Burke
Laura Burke was appointed as Director General of the EPA in November
2011. Laura joined the Environmental Protection Agency in 2004, as the
Director of the EPA’s Office of Communications and Corporate Services.
She took over the position of Director of the EPA’s Office of Climate,
Licensing and Resource Use in August 2008. Laura is a Chemical
Engineering graduate from University College Dublin and holds an MSc
from Trinity College Dublin. Before joining the EPA in September 2004,
Laura worked in the private sector.
Marianne Fay
Marianne Fay is the Chief Economist of the Climate Change Cross Cutting
Solutions Area of the World Bank. She co-directed the World
Development Report 2010 on Development and Climate Change and led
the World Bank report on Inclusive Green growth: the Pathway to
Sustainable Development. She has held positions in different regions of
the World Bank (Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the
Caribbean, Africa) working on infrastructure, urbanization and climate
change. Prior to her current position, she served as the Chief Economist
of the former Sustainable Development Network of the World Bank. She
is the author of a number of articles and books on these topics.
Marianne Fay holds a PhD in Economics from Columbia University.
Paul Ekins
Paul Ekins has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of London and is
Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy at and Director of the
UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London. He is
also Deputy Director of the UK Energy Research Centre, and the UKERC
Co-Director leading on its Energy Resources theme. In addition, he is a
member of UNEP's International Resource Panel; a Fellow of the Energy
Institute; a Senior Consultant to Cambridge Econometrics; ; and he leads
UCL’s participation in the EPSRC SUPERGEN consortium on hydrogen fuel
cells and on bioenergy research. In 2011 he was appointed ViceChairman of the DG Environment Commissioner’s High-Level Economists
Expert Group on Resource Efficiency and a member of the European
Commission's high-level European Resource Efficiency Platform.
Gwenole Cozigou
Gwenole Cozigou is Director for Industrial Transformation and Advanced
Value Chains, in Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry,
Entrepreneurship and SME.
An economist by training, he has been an official in the European
Commission since 1985 in the fields of Enterprise and Industrial Policy
and of External Relations.
Since December 2008, he has been Director in DG GROWTH (DG Internal
Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs), in charge of
competitiveness issues and EU internal market legislation for several
industrial sectors.
His main responsibilities today cover: circular economy, energy union
and energy-intensive industries, construction, automotive industries,
raw materials, engineering industries.
Karl Falkenberg
Karl Falkenberg has a long experience as a negotiator in the European
Commission. He was involved in the Uruguay Round negotiations and
has been negotiating the telecommunications and financial services
agreements in WTO. From 1997 to December 2000 he was in charge of
the coordination of all WTO issues. In 2001 he was appointed Director in
charge of sectoral trade policies and bilateral trade relations with North
America, Japan, the Mediterranean area and the African, Caribbean and
Pacific countries and in 2002 Director for Free trade agreements,
Agricultural trade questions, ACP. From 2005 to 2008 he coordinated all
bilateral trade policies as Deputy Director General. In January 2009, he
took up the position of Director General of the Environment, covering
the EU's environmental policy in both its domestic and international
dimensions.
Karl Falkenberg is a trained economist and journalist.
Maarten Hajer
Maarten A. Hajer (1962) currently serves as the Director-General of the
PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the prime advisor
to the Dutch Cabinet and Parliament on issues of land use, environment
and nature conservation (cf. www.pbl.nl/en). He is professor of Public
Policy at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the UN’s
International Resource Panel (IRP, hosted by UNEP) for which he leads
the working group on Cities, together with Mark Swilling (Capetown), as
well as the working group on Food.
Professor Hajer holds MA degrees in Political Science and in Urban and
Regional Planning (both University of Amsterdam) and got his D.Phil. in
Politics from Oxford University.
Emyr Roberts
Emyr was born in Benllech, Anglesey, and obtained his first degree in
geography and economics at Reading University, and a PhD at
Aberystwyth University. In 2003 he became Chief Executive of the Welsh
European Funding Office. Within the Welsh Government, Emyr has been
Director of the Department for Social Justice and Local Government;
Director General, Public Services and Local Government Delivery; and
Director General, Education and Skills.
In November 2012 Emyr was appointed Chief Executive of Natural
Resources Wales (NRW), which came into operation in April 2013. NRW
is the main environmental agency in Wales, with a combination of
regulatory, advisory, scientific, incident response, land management and
enterprise functions. He has led the successful transition from the three
legacy bodies into an exciting young organisation with its own standalone capability and vision.
Emyr is an honorary fellow of Aberystwyth University.
Fokko Wientjes
Fokko is Vice-President Corporate Sustainability & Public Private
Partnerships. He has developed Sustainability in DSM from corporate
responsibility to be a strategic business-driver. Sustainability is now core
part of the DSM strategy, as one of the four strategic growth drivers for
the company. He also increased the awareness around the strategic
importance of stakeholder engagement, introduced strategic
stakeholder management in the company and established Public Private
Partnership competences in DSM and is in that capacity the Program
Director of the largest PPP of DSM, with UN WFP. He is DSM liaison with
World Economic Forum and World Business Council on Sustainable
Development.
After joining DSM in 1988 he has held positions in HRM, Logistics,
Marketing & Sales, Change Program Management and General
Management. As Regional Director South America, he started DSM
Engineering Plastics activities in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He was General
Manager DSM Anti-Infectives in Cairo, Egypt, where he was assigned to
make a turnaround in the business. He then returned to Europe to
operate in Schaffhausen, Switzerland as HR director for DSM Composite
Resins.
Fokko has a degree in Psychology, followed by several courses in the
field of Marketing, HR, Sustainability and Management eg at INSEAD.
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.
From 2010 until his appointment at the EEA, he was head of the HIVA
Research Institute in Leuven, Belgium, a policy-oriented research
institute associated with the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he
was also head of the Political Science department from 2007 to 2010.
Over the last 20 years, he has conducted research in more than a dozen
countries, in areas including environmental politics, climate change, and
sustainable development. He has taught on 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.
Per Mickwitz
Professor Per Mickwitz works as the Research Director of the Finnish
Environment Institute (SYKE), a governmental research institute with
about 650 employees. He has a PhD in environmental policy from the
University of Tampere. He has studied environmental policy evaluation,
reflexive governance as well as energy and climate policy issues. In
particular issues related to stability and change in energy systems and
the role of innovation and climate policies for these processes. Since
2014 Per Mickwitz is the chair of the Finnish Strategic Research Council
and a member of the Scientific Committee of the European Environment
Agency. In 2011 he co-edited a special issue “Promoting Transformation
towards Sustainable Consumption and Production in a Resource and
Energy Intensive Economy – the Case of Finland” in the Journal of
Cleaner Production.
Additional information is available at: www.syke.fi/permickwitz/en
Kristín L. Árnadóttir
Kristín Linda Árnadóttir serves as Director General of the Environment
Agency of Iceland since 2008. The main role of the agency is to promote
the protection as well as sustainable use of Iceland’s natural resources,
and public welfare by helping to ensure a healthy environment, and safe
consumer goods. She is also a member of the management board of the
Swan label that is a nordic ecolabel established for the purpose of
providing an environmental labelling scheme that would contribute to a
sustainable consumption
Kristín Linda is a Cand. jur from the University of Iceland and and holds
an LL.M from Lund University in European law and M.Sc from Lunds
University International Master´s Programme in Environmental Studies
and Sustainability Science. (LUMES).
Riina Antikainen
Docent Riina Antikainen is a senior researcher and a research
coordinator for the Research programme of sustainable economic
systems in the Finnish Environment Insitute (SYKE). She has worked in
SYKE since 1999 with the exception of 10 month leave in 2012 during
which she worked as senior consultant in the Spinverse Oy in the field of
green economy and as the coordinator of the Tekes Green Growth
Programme. Her current research interests are related to promoting
green and circular economy and sustainable use of natural resources
among societies and between various actors.
Martin Darmo
Martin Darmo holds a PhD. in economics from the University of
Economics in Bratislava. His research focused on environmental taxation,
and on economic instruments in the environmental area in general. He
has been working in the Ministry of Environment of the Slovak Republic
since 2009 (Climate Change Department), from 2012 as director of
Economic Instruments and Analysis Department. The department is in
charge of Green Growth and the Green Economy agenda, as well as for
the Greening of the European Semester, including coordinating National
Reform Programmes in the Slovak Republic.