Getting serious about climate change: How business must step up

Naomi Klein (she/her) is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and international bestselling author of eight books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough and On Fire, which have been translated into over 35 languages. Her most recent book is How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.

She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept, and an inaugural Marielle Franco fellow of the Social Justice Initiative Portal Project at the University of Chicago. In 2018, she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia in the Department of Geography as UBC Professor of Climate Justice and is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. 

Dr. Carol Liao (she/her) is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Business Law at UBC Allard School of Law. She is also the UBC Sauder Distinguished Scholar of the Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics at the UBC Sauder School of Business. Her research focuses on corporate law and sustainability, climate governance, gender and racial justice. In 2021, she received the Influential Women in Business Award from Business in Vancouver and was named as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network.  

Dr. Liao is the Principal Investigator of a SSHRC IG project studying the evolution of Canadian and international corporate legal principles from an environmental, social and economic sustainability lens. She is a Principal co-Investigator of the Canada Climate Law Initiative advancing knowledge on fiduciary obligation and climate governance. She is the editor and co-editor of two new 2022 books, Corporate Law and Sustainability from the Next Generation of Lawyers (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and Innovating Business for Sustainability: Regulatory Approaches in the Anthropocene (with Beate Sjåfjell and Aikaterini Argyrou, Edward Elgar). She has delivered over 100 invited talks around the world on sustainable business and has been quoted over 60 times in news media on corporate governance and equity issues. 
 

Tamara Vrooman (she/her) is a transformational leader with a strong financial background who understands the intrinsic link between a strong and sustainable economy and a healthy community.   

Tamara is CEO of the Vancouver Airport Authority (YVR), Canada’s second busiest airport. Prior to this, Tamara was President & CEO of Vancity, Canada’s largest community credit union with $28 billion in assets, and Deputy Minister of Finance for the Province of British Columbia and as Secretary to the Treasury Board and CEO of the Public Sector Employers' Council. Her expertise has been sought by organizations, leaders and governments at all levels—regional, provincial, national and international—whether on the economy, social change, or environmental sustainability, and often at the intersection of all three. Tamara also serves as Simon Fraser University’s 12^th Chancellor.  

Tamara chairs the Board of the Canada Infrastructure Bank and the Rick Hansen Foundation, in addition to other board roles. She is the recipient of the Order of British Columbia (2019), Peter Lougheed Award for Leadership in Public Policy (2016) and BC CEO of the Year Award – Major Private Company, Business in Vancouver (2015) among many other citations.  

Dr. Kate White (she/her) holds a Professorship in Consumer Insights, Prosocial Consumption, and Sustainability at the UBC Sauder School of Business. She is also the Senior Associate Dean of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and the Academic Director of the Peter P. Dhillon Centre for Business Ethics.   

 Kate’s research focuses on how to encourage ethical, prosocial, and sustainable consumer behaviours. Kate was honored as one of the top 5 Marketing Researchers in the world by the American Marketing Association and was recently given a Canada Clean 50 Award for thought leadership in the domain of sustainability and the American Marketing Association’s Award for Responsible Research in Marketing. Kate currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Marketing Research and is on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing, and the Journal of Consumer Psychology.   

Kate has collaborated on various sustainable behaviour-change projects with organizations such as The City of Calgary, Starbucks, Proctor and Gamble, The Share, Reuse, Repair Initiative, TransLink, My Sustainable Canada, and BC Hydro.  

Lien Yeung (she/her) is the award-winning multimedia host and producer of CBC Vancouver News Saturdays and Sundays. Her journalism career has taken her from Canada’s Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic Coast. 

Since working for CBC Vancouver News, she has covered a wide range of important stories from the 2017 BC wildfires (her coverage earned her an RTDNA award, and Webster award nominations), the Amtrak derailment, and the London Bridge attack. A team player with sharp news judgment, there’s nothing Yeung loves more than when a story comes together to serve the public interest. She feels privileged to be able to give people a platform so their stories can be heard. 

She first began her career in marketing and communications. After discovering her passion for telling the stories of Metro Vancouver’s diverse communities, Yeung decided to transition to public service journalism.