ICE Panel debate: Can we afford to delay climate readiness?

Matt Mace

As an award-winning journalist, Matt has been covering the climate emergency and corporate sustainability for twelve years, focusing on key agendas such as green policy, climate trends, innovation and corporate strategies and sustainability functions.

Matt is now the editor of edie and oversees written content and in-person events and discussions for the brand.

Janet Greenwood

Janet Greenwood is a seasoned built environment professional with over 30 years of experience, leading complex, high-value projects and programmes across rail, road, water, wastewater and flood defence.

Most recently, Janet served as KPMG’s Global Lead for Sustainable Infrastructure. In 2024 Janet won The Times Consultant of the Year and the Management Consultancies Association Experienced Leader Award. She is Chair of the Major Projects Association’s Sustainability Ambassadors, a past member of the Institution of Civil Engineer’s Inspiring Engineering Excellence Board and founder member of the Cambridge University Centre for Smart Infrastructure in Construction’s Carbon Code.

A Visiting Fellow at Southampton University Business School, a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation and a Policy Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, she has extensive experience in delivering sustainability, social value and carbon priorities in major construction projects and supporting built environment clients to deliver their most challenging programmes.

Matthew Bell

He has been helping clients for over 25 years on the design of effective policies, including cost-benefit analysis, impact assessment, policy design, behavioural research and quantitative modelling.

He has worked extensively on healthcare, climate change and environmental issues; as well as on industrial policy, education, housing and criminal justice. His work has focused on the UK but he has offered expert advice to Governments in over 20 countries on all continents.

Matthew is a member of the HM Treasury and Cabinet Office’s Evaluation and Trial Advice Panel (ETAP), which supports the design and delivery of robust, high-quality evaluation across government and oversees several large areas of government spending. ETAP is managed by the Evaluation Task Force and brings together top evaluation and experimentation experts from across the UK to provide free evaluation advice to civil servants and What Works Centres.

From 2014 to 2017 he was the Chief Executive of the UK Committee on Climate Change. In that capacity he oversaw all the Committee’s work, including its advice to Parliament and work to influence the passage of legislation and policies relating to greenhouse gas reduction and adaptation to climate change. Earlier in his career he worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. He is widely recognised as an expert in using economic analysis to design effective policies.

Matthew was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List 2018 for services to combatting climate change.

Ingrid Holmes

Ingrid Holmes is Deputy CEO of the Green Finance Institute. She joined GFI in 2021 from Federated Hermes, where she was a Director in the Responsible Investment Team and led the development of the firm’s first Net Zero Policy.

She previously held roles at dedicated low-carbon asset manager Climate Change Capital, and also climate diplomacy thinktank E3G, where she established and built their Sustainable Finance Programme. She also held roles as an Adviser in the UK Parliament and in the UK’s environment department DEFRA.

She has 20 years of experience working on environmental policy and sustainable finance. She has previously served as a Member of the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance and ran the Secretariat for the Green Finance Taskforce, which led to the establishment of the Green Finance Institute. Her abiding passion is the development of institutional, policy and financial solutions to scale investment into climate change solutions.

Ingrid has a BSc in Biological Sciences (Hons Zoology) from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College London.

Dr Richard Millar

Richard is Director of Adaptation at the Climate Change Committee. He leads the secretariat’s adaptation work, advising how the UK can build resilience to climate change. Richard is a physical climate scientist by training and holds a doctorate in atmospheric physics.

Richard has worked across the CCC’s remit since joining in 2018; prior to joining, he contributed to the IPCC’s Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C as a researcher in UK academia. Richard was an Oxford Martin fellow at the Oxford Martin School prior to joining the CCC and completed both his undergraduate and DPhil in the University of Oxford Physics Department.