The Climate Map podcast is an archive for our research, highlight discussions with climate actionists across the world.
Peter Yolles is a managing partner at Echo River Capital, a venture capital firm that he founded in 2021 to invest in software-enabled water and wastewater technologies that improve human health, the environment, and climate resilience. With an MBA from Yale School of Management and a Master's Degree in Water Science, Management and Policy from Yale School of the Environment, Peter has over 30 years of experience in the water industry as an impact investor, entrepreneur, operator, and advisor.
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Brian Tsuyoshi Takeda is a global citizen. Born in Japan, raised in Canada, studied in part in Chile, lives in Norway, and works out of the company offices in the Netherlands—he brings unique insights into cultures, people and opportunities to do good.
A consummate entrepreneur, he holds a Business Degree from Queen's University, Canada, where he also co-founded Muzi Tea, helping to introduce Matcha green tea to North America. Later as the Marketing Director of Norway Pelagic, he promoted Nordic specialty seafoods to East Asian markets and gained a remarkable appreciation for the potential opportunities of fusing technology and culture to create innovative solutions.
These insights proved extraordinarily valuable during his time as the Director of Innovation at Kaston, where he cultivated numerous innovative ventures including what would then become Urchinomics.
Brian’s guiding passion for innovation manifests in his desire to prove that for-profit ventures can be a powerful driver of positive change. With proper incentives, clear ethical boundaries, and the right amount of human ingenuity, he believes restoring coastal ecosystems and creating meaningful jobs can be done responsibly, profitably, and have a sustained, positive effect on climate change through blue carbon sequestration. In short, to ‘do good’.
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Hossam Allam is the founder and Managing Partner at Climate Resilient Africa Fund (CRAF), which backs Africa technologies at the intersection of agri-food and climate action. He is a prolific angel investor, founded Cairo Angels, which has backed hundreds of Middle Eastern startups, and is a 500 Global instructor on venture finance. Before CRAF, he built and exited a market leading 4,000-person building services business. Previous to that, he spent 10 years at Shell first as an environmentalist, and then post MBA, developing natural gas markets for small scale distribution as well as USD multi-billion country-to-country sales. He is a marine environmental scientist by training.
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Ameer is the Founder & CTO of AgroSpheres since its inception in 2016. Ameer leads technology development and strategic collaborations for the company. He manages global multi-year partnerships and overseas manufacturing expansion for the company. Ameer has also co-led the company's growth from 5 to 40+ employees across 3 different sites. Ameer is passionate about technology that positively impacts people and helps society around the world.
Namra Khalid is an architectural designer turned urban researcher and a positive change maker. Her work strives to create socio-climatic justice in the most vulnerable communities of Pakistan. She is the founder and director of Karachi Cartography (karachicartography.org), which aims to rethink the city for improved climate planning, adaptation, and resilience. Problem identification - mapping - is the essential first step in understanding what was, is, and can become. Hence she has initiated the work with cartographic analysis focused on water systems. For this, she was selected as one of the World Around's 25 under and 25 climate designers 2023. Among the 25 she was further awarded the Young Climate Visionary Prize, and presented her work at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
She is also the co-founder of Tabahi Naqsha (website coming soon: TabahiNaqsha.pk), a real-time disaster information-sharing system in development, by CogniCity OSS. It aims to accelerate humanitarian response across Pakistan by harnessing the power of crowdsourcing through social media.
Henk Ovink is a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute and Founding Commissioner for the Global Commission on the Economics of Water.
Henk was the first Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, responsible for advocating water awareness around the world: building institutional capacity and coalitions amongst communities, governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector, and NGOs, initiating innovative approaches like Water as Leverage, and actively empowering young professionals. He was the lead for the Netherlands and a driving force as a co-host for the UN 2023 Water Conference.
Henk is affiliated with the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes at Columbia University’s GSAPP and Climate School and is a lecturer at the University of Groningen. Henk holds an honorary doctorate at Delft University. In 2023, Henk Ovink was the 10th recipient of the Foreign Affairs Decoration of Honor in Gold for his unique and outstanding water diplomacy work.
Stanley Anigbogu, founder of LightEd, created a system that recycles e-waste into solar-powered lighting solutions when combined with locally sourced materials. LightEd’s program “The Light for Peace” has already provided over 22,000 internally displaced refugees and 500 students with clean energy sources to replace kerosene lamps and candles.
This access to consistent light has huge social and economic benefits: enabling students to extend their working hours, small business owners to lengthen their trading hours, and making rural areas more safe and accessible.
Dr. Moetasim (Moet) Ashfaq is a computational climate scientist. His expertise lies in using global and regional climate and hydrological models to understand the past, present, and future climate fluctuations resulting from natural and anthropogenic changes and their implications for natural and human systems. In particular, his research focuses on developing methods for reliably identifying the dominant mechanisms governing the climate system response on a global, regional, and hydrologic basin scale, quantifying model-based uncertainties associated with such physical processes and developing a framework for multidisciplinary Earth System modeling to study climate change and variability in a comprehensive, rigorous way.
Etta Madete is an architect, sustainable design expert, and developer passionate about sustainable real estate development in emerging markets. She has 8+ years of experience in the built environment, leading teams, managing projects, and co-founding a company that raised over $2 million to build 137 sustainable homes in Nairobi. Passionate about advocacy, Etta previously taught at the University of Nairobi, is an EDGE Expert, Aspen and Mandela Washington Fellow, and a sought-after speaker. She has co-led acclaimed exhibitions at the Barbican and at the Guggenheim with Rem Koolhaas and has over 15 publications in Aljazeera and Architectural Record, amongst others.
A performance-driven systems thinker, Etta has an Undergraduate degree in Architecture, a Masters in Sustainable Architecture from the University of Nairobi, and is currently pursuing her Master's in Real Estate from Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Anushka Shahdadpuri is the founder of Aamchi, a community-led organization in India dedicated to addressing Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) issues in informal settlements. She is the World Around-Meta Open Arts, Young Climate Prize Fellow 2022 and the WSA-UN Youth Ambassador 2023 for India. She grew up in a refugee colony in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, where the government failed to provide basic infrastructure, and developed ambitions to help others in similar situations access WASH services. Her project, Tanki, is a novel water distribution system, harnessing rainwater to bring one million liters of water a year to public toilets in the city, which has the potential to scale and provide access to clean running water for millions of people. This is particularly important for girls and women in India. She is currently a Masters Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Foday David Kamara is an environmental solutionist and sustainability advocate committed to combatting urban waste management, promoting sustainable cities and communities, and mitigating climate change through Ecovironment. This social enterprise recycles plastic waste into eco-friendly bricks and paving tiles. By doing so, his project replaces conventional construction materials, promotes climate resilience, and reduces the cost of acquiring construction materials by 25%.
His accolades include the 2023 Young Climate Prize and the 776 Climate Fellowship Award. He has also been featured in several global magazines, including Meta, Bloomberg, and Microsoft.
Tatiana Bilbao began her eponymous studio in 2004 with the aim of integrating social values, collaboration, and sensitive design approaches to architectural work. The work of Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO intersects with research allowing design for diverse circumstances and reconstruction or crisis scenarios. Prior to founding her firm, Bilbao was an Advisor in the Ministry of Development and Housing of the Government of the Federal District of Mexico City, during this period she was part of the General Development Directorate of the Advisory Council for Urban Development in the City.
Bilbao holds a recurring teaching position at Yale University School of Architecture and has taught at Harvard University GSD, AA Association in London, Columbia University GSAPP, Rice University, University of Andrés Bello in Chile, and Peter Behrens School of Arts at HS Dusseldorf in Germany. Her work has been published in The New York Times, A + U, Domus, among others.
Max is the editorial director of Dezeen, joining the team in March 2023. During the previous two decades, Max has worked as a design commentator across digital media, books, magazines, exhibitions, video, and events to broaden the conversation around contemporary design and architecture.
He is the author of multiple design books including Design UK and Designers On Design, which he co-wrote with Sir Terence Conran. More recent titles include the London Design Guide series and monograph titles about designers Piet Hein Eek, Luca Nichetto and Benjamin Hubert.
As a journalist, Max has worked as a design correspondent for CNN Style and written for publications including Financial Times, Wallpaper, Icon, Surface, London’s Evening Standard, and Newsweek International.
He has worked as a content consultant for companies and organizations across the world, and worked as the deputy director of the London Design Festival from 2012-2015.
Sahithi Radha is a climate actionist from Hyderabad, India. Originally in local schools and campuses around India, Sahithi and her team hold “awareness sessions” to educate students about the dangers of electronic waste. In collaboration with recycling partners, they also safely recycle and refurbish items collected from these sessions, as part of their project E-Cycle. For this work, Sahithi was named one of Meta’s Young Climate Prize 25 Under 25 and featured in various publications. She also served as an Indian Regional Ambassador for TUNZA - UNEP, a climate activism program powered by Samsung and the United Nations Environmental Program.
Slobodan P. Simonovic is globally recognized for his unique interdisciplinary research in Systems Analysis and the development of deterministic and stochastic simulation, optimization, multi criteria analysis, and other decision-making methodologies for addressing challenging system of systems problems lying at the confluence of society, technology and the environment. His research has been applied with a sustainable development perspective in water resources management, hydrology, energy, climate change and public infrastructure. His main contributions include modelling risk and resilience of complex systems. Professor Simonovic has influenced academia, industry and government via university teaching, publication of leading-edge research, mentoring of young people, delivering stimulating research seminars at institutions around the world, carrying out joint research projects, and consulting work. He has received awards for excellence in teaching, research and outreach. Dr. Simonovic has published over 550 professional publications (over 240 in peer reviewed Journals) and three major textbooks. He has been inducted to the Canadian Academy of Engineering in June of 2013.
Amber Silver is an Assistant Professor for the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security. She received her PhD in Geography and Environmental Management from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Her primary research interests focus on how individuals and groups make decisions before, during, and after high-impact weather. More specifically, she is interested in the roles that public attention, risk perception, and communication play in protective action decision making during extreme events. Her most recent research has focused on the ways that new technologies, including social media, influence how individuals obtain, interpret, and respond to official and unofficial warning information.
Dr. Silver has shared the findings of her research in local, national, and international conferences and symposiums, including The World Weather Open Science Conference, the American Meteorological Society’s annual conference, and the Association of American Geographer’s conference. Her research has also been published in related journals, including Meteorological Applications, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, and Journal of Environmental Psychology.
Dr. Sobia Rose is an experienced public policy expert with core areas of specialization in agriculture, environment, climate change, health economics, and resource economics. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental and Resource Economics and currently serving as a Research Fellow at Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), the country’s premier National Think Tank. In this capacity, her primary role revolves around the evaluations of government planning and development initiatives and providing vital support to policy-related matters. Dr. Rose's specific areas of focus are agricultural policy, fiscal policy and governance, as well as food security, and youth-related concerns. She has been actively engaged in diverse projects addressing issues such as climate change, public health, food security, natural resource management, and the dynamics of caste-based agriculture and land utilization.
Omar Mbye is a youth leader currently serving as the Executive Director of the Sustainability Alliance-The Gambia. He is the Project Manager for the CERA Project, which builds community environmental resilience through agroforestry in The Gambia. He is also an environmental consultant at SKM Environmental Consultancy. An active participant in community service activities, Omar initiated various climate education programs within his region and at the international level. Finally, he participated in the eighteenth session of the African Ministerial Conference (AMCEN), committed to natural resources management in The Gambia.
Sean is currently in the final year of his MBA program at the University of South Florida, and has been fortunate to call the Tampa Bay region home throughout his entire life. Sean has been afforded opportunities for service within government, education, and nonprofit areas where he has strived to create tangible impacts.
For the last year, Sean served as the District Office Manager for now-former US Congressman Charlie Crist, playing an important role in helping oversee the Congressman’s work and involvements in a multitude of areas within the Pinellas county community. Additionally, Sean served as the Campus Governor at the USF St. Petersburg campus where he led efforts to implement positive actions related to sustainability, student engagement, and community involvement. In partnership with Sean’s team and community partners, the installation of a WATERGOAT device in the St. Petersburg marina has been recognized by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research as a real example of creating partnerships to achieve the SDGs.
Sheeksha Bastola, a dedicated medical student, combines her passion for healthcare with her deep commitment to combating climate change. She actively contributes to research in the medical field and emerges as a proactive climate activist. Through volunteering at the United Nations, she channels her actions into meaningful initiatives addressing social issues in her local context. Her dedication reflects a holistic approach, envisioning a sustainable future that encompasses the well-being of both humanity and the environment.