Steve Howard
CEO
Steve is the CEO of The Climate Group which he co-founded in late 2003. He has worked on a variety of social and environmental issues from within business, NGO and UN settings. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Carbon Standards Disclosure Board and an Advisor to the Virgin Earth Challenge. Whilst at the Climate Group Steve has assisted HSBC in developing its carbon neutral strategy and becoming the world’s first carbon neutral Fortune 100 company ahead of schedule. He has worked with the City of London to help establish the London Climate Change Agency and found the C40 large cities initiative and has helped facilitate the Montreal Declaration of States and Regions on climate change with the Premier’s of Quebec and Manitoba which has led on to the formation of the Climate State’s Alliance. Steve has also lead the formation of a major consumer campaign and has formed a partnership with LiveEarth. He has advised and briefed many leading companies, CEOs, and State and Government leaders and VIPs on various aspects of climate change. He has given several hundred climate change presentations to diverse audiences around the world and has chaired meetings with business and government leaders including the Long Beach meeting of business leaders with Governor Schwarzenegger and Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Prior to his role with The Climate Group, Steve was a Partner in ERM where he led on Corporate Social Responsibility for clients as diverse as Kingfisher and ABN Amro and on climate change related projects for a range of organisations including EDF Energy, BP, WWF and The World Bank. Previously he was the founding Director of the Global Forest and Trade Network for WWF International, where he led an international team involved in advising 700 companies on forest and supply chain issues. He was also Chairman of the UK Forest Stewardship Council where he helped achieve a far-reaching consensus on a national forest certification standard. Steve was founding Chairman of the Tropical Forest Trust, which he helped establish to respond to the need for ethically sourced tropical timber. He has a first class honours degree in ecology and a PhD in Environmental Physics based on work as a Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry in Kenya and the University of Nottingham. Over the course of his career Steve has worked in more than thirty countries. He has a wife, a young son and squeezes in triathlons between work and family commitments.