Climate and Nature Tech

Karen Ho is the Head of Corporate and Community Sustainability for WWF-Hong Kong. She works with stakeholders across public and private sectors as well as civil society to make Hong Kong a sustainable city; explores collaboration opportunities for community-based environmental protection projects and advancing sustainable development goals (SDGs); advises on strategies and best practices of setting science-based target, measurement, reporting and verification (MRV), environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure, low-carbon transformation, nature-based solutions (NbS) and net-zero circular economy. Under her leadership, the Low Carbon Manufacturing Programme (LCMP) and LOOP PLUS have helped hundreds of companies establish their baseline, take actions and improve climate /ESG performance. An accomplished senior executive, Karen held senior management positions in several Fortune 500 companies prior to joining WWF.

My Sustainability Goals for 2025:

1. To raise awareness of the interconnectedness of climate action, nature conservation, and sustainable development, and
2. To support and contribute to a whole-of-society approach that systemically integrates climate and biodiversity considerations into all relevant policies, strategies, and practices.

Reshmi is the Global Energy Transition Lead at WWF, based out of WWF Hong Kong where she coordinates the global alliance on CLEANaction (the Coalition Linking Energy And Nature for action) and Alliance for Just Energy Transformation (AJET) as well as working with WWF global offices to implement energy transition solutions and models. As part of these alliance she works with global members to promote renewable energy solutions ensuring it causes minimum impact to nature, biodiversity and at the same time the whole process is just and equitable. She is a climate and energy professional with experience of leading multilateral clean energy projects on solar, electric mobility and energy efficiency adoption in Asia. She led delivery of energy transition projects in Asia on corporate and community decarbonisation. These include decarbonising the textiles and industrial sectors in Viet Nam, decarbonising Indian dairy cold chain, decarbonising water transport in Sundarbans, building capacities of banks and organisations on climate transition plans and biodiversity safeguards in Indonesia. Before the 2.5 years with WWF, she was in India and advised the British and German Embassies in her role as energy advisor on bilateral clean energy projects.

My Sustainability Goal for 2025:

To promote clean energy transition that is just, equitable and causes minimum impact on biodiversity and nature

Sam is a Chartered Environmentalist (MIEMA, CEnv) with over 10 years’ experience in business & sustainability. At Swire Pacific, one of Sam’s responsibilities is managing a Group Sustainable Development Fund, supporting trials and roll-out of cleantech innovation within the business. In addition to advising senior management of key developments and policies related to sustainable development, he is responsible for supporting the implementation of the Group’s sustainability strategy, SwireTHRIVE, with a focus on waste & circularity, and nature-related risks and opportunities.

Sam has extensive experience on strategy development and ESG disclosures. He is currently an expert member of the IUCN’s Climate Crisis Commission. Prior to his role at Swire Pacific, he worked for Swire Coca-Cola and Finlays (B2B coffee & tea supplier) in commercial, logistics and sustainability roles. He also worked for the UN on climate and multilateral diplomacy topics. Sam holds a MBA from IE Business School in Madrid alongside two Master’s degrees including an MA in International Affairs from the Graduate Institute Geneva, and a Bachelor’s degree in Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford.

My Sustainability Goals for 2025:

Managing the Swire Pacific Sustainable Development Fund always provides me a boost of optimism as we get to see amazing new technologies – some of which are homegrown in Hong Kong – to help us achieve our sustainability goals. We have added a new metering & AI channel this year, and so one of my goals is to have applications come in for this channel. Outside of my role, I’m particularly keen on seeing the development of global biodiversity financing, and through my membership of IUCN, I intend to highlight mechanisms and actions to support nature in cities.

Serge Stinckwich is a computer scientist and the Head of Research at the United Nations University Institute in Macau. Before joining UNU, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Caen Normandie (France) and a researcher in the UMMISCO international joint research unit of IRD (French Research Institute on Sustainable Development) Sorbonne University.

Over the years, Serge developed an innovative research program about modelling and simulation of complex systems at the intersection of several scientific disciplines applied to developing countries’ issues. His research interests are domain-specific languages and tools that ease the tasks of non-computer experts to model, simulate and analyse complex systems. He has applied his work to Epidemiology, Environmental Monitoring and Disaster Management.

From 2008 to 2012, he worked in Hanoi, Vietnam, on the AROUND (Autonomous Robots for Observation of Urban Networks) programme, which deals with deploying simple mobile autonomous sensors during disasters in the context of southern countries. He has also been an invited Professor at Kyoto University to work with Japanese experts on Rescue Robotics.

In 2017, he was based in Cameroon. With colleagues from the University of Yaoundé, he worked on Complex System modelling and Artificial Intelligence applied to applications like epidemiological surveillance and environmental monitoring in collaboration with IRD and CIRAD research institutes.

From 2018 to 2018, Serge was the Principal Investigator of GDRI Sense-South, an international research network of teams from Senegal, Cameroon, Vietnam and France working on “Innovative Sensors and IoT Telecommunication Networks for Environmental Surveillance in Southern Countries”. Sense-south funds actions like the “Smart Clean Garden” project to control the water purification in soils and the sustainable city project of Douala (Cameroon) with a local climate change observatory.
He organised and co-organized more than 50 workshops and conferences on topics such as Software Engineering, Modelling and Simulation, Rescue Robotics, Disaster Management, and Complex Systems, … and supervised more than 20 PhD/Masters students from various countries (Chile, Vietnam, Cameroon, Senegal, etc.).

My Sustainability Goals for 2025:

To pursue research interests in artificial intelligence applied to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agent based modelling, simulation and modelling of complex systems

Hadrian is a Senior Manager at Carbon Trust. Based in Singapore, he leads the advisory portfolio covering finance & infrastructure sector clients across Southeast Asia. He has over 12 years’ experience climate policy and finance, energy efficiency finance and implementation, corporate sustainability amongst others.

His experience includes working with multilateral agencies and governments of Lebanon, Mauritius, Eswatini and Indonesia on the design and development of Nationally Determined Contributions. He has also delivered the energy efficiency thematic track under the ASEAN Low Carbon Energy Programme having assisted national institutions of Malaysia, Philippines, and Vietnam.

He is presently delivering several innovation programmes funded by bilateral and multilateral donors to scale-up climate mitigation technologies. Notable work include the FCDO funded ‘Innovation and Technology Fund for Govt of Indonesia and IKEA Foundation led Zero Emissions Generator initiative for Africa-Asia.