Next Steps: financing net zero

Kate Levick

Kate Levick leads E3G’s activities on Sustainable Finance, working with a wide range of public and private finance sector stakeholders to support ambitious finance and climate policy outcomes.

Prior to joining E3G Kate spent a decade as Global Director for Policy Engagement at CDP. Before this she worked for the UK government’s Office of Climate Change and spent several years working for BP Plc in a variety of commercial and environmental roles.

Kate chairs the Policy workstream of the UK’s Green Technical Advisory Group, and is a member of the Advisory Panel to the Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net Zero. She co-leads the Secretariat for the UK’s Transition Plan Taskforce.

Outside work Kate enjoys open water swimming, cinema and cocktails.

Suranjali Tandon

Suranjali Tandon is Assistant Professor at NIPFP. She is a special invitee to the task force on sustainable finance,India and is an expert invitee to IFSCA's sub-committee on sustainable finance related disclosures. She has worked in the past on many projects with the Department of Revenue and Department of Economic Affairs on key policy issues. She currently leads the institute's work on sustainable finance and tax.

Previously an Economist Consultant for the NiPFP, Suranjali contributed to other research studies such as:

• (2020), "India - Is the Tax System Neutral in India: An Analysis of Tax Treatment of Selected Funds", Issue: Finance and Capital Markets (formerly Derivatives & Financial Instruments), 2020 (Volume 22), No. 1 IBFD
• (2019), "Frontier analysis for State Excise in India", NIPFP Working Paper No. 276
• (2018), "The Multilateral Legal Instrument: A developing country perspective", NIPFP Working Paper No. 220
• (2017), "Tax Compliance in India: An Experimental Approach", NIPFP Working Paper No. 207
• (2017), "Trade Misinvoicing: What can we Measure", NIPFP Working Paper No. 200

Eleanor Akers

Eleanor founded IEC in 2021 to help businesses grow sustainably. Eleanor works with businesses around the world to help them understand where they are on their sustainability journeys and plot their next steps on the road to Net-Zero. She is passionate about commercialising innovation to achieve sustainability at scale, particularly at the intersection of big data and energy.

She is a Chartered Chemical Engineer with an MBA from Johns Hopkins. Prior to founding IEC, she worked for Constellation New Energy in the United States and BP in the United Kingdom. She has experience at all stages of the energy value chain in Europe and North America.

She is a keen reader and loves sports – she is currently preparing for her first triathlon!

Lord Tony Berkeley

Tony Berkeley joined the House of Lords in 1994, firstly as a hereditary peer and, from 2001, as a Life Peer. He was an opposition Transport Spokesperson from 1996 to 1997. He is currently a member of the Goods Sub-Committee of the EU Committee looking at related Brexit issues. For many years, he was secretary, and is now a patron, of the All-Party Parliamentary Cycling Group, and is secretary of the All-Party Rail Group and the Ports and Maritime Groups.

Tony is a civil engineer whose career spans designing and building bridges, dams, ports and harbours and the Channel Tunnel, where he played a leading role in the construction and public affairs operation for 15 years. He was Public Affairs Manager of Eurotunnel from 1981 until the end of construction of the Channel Tunnel in 1994 and, before that, worked for George Wimpey plc on a number of civil engineering projects in the UK and overseas.

From 1994, he led the Piggyback Consortium, developing new ways of carrying trucks on trains, before becoming Chairman of the Rail Freight Group, the industry body of the rail freight sector, from 1998 to 2018.

He was a Board member and past President of the European Rail Freight Association, the grouping of private operators and other companies promoting European rail freight transport and its stakeholders active in that area through the complete liberalisation of the market. More recently, he helped form Allrail, a European representative body of private operators and other companies, primarily in the passenger rail sector, with similar objectives to ERFA, and remains a Board Member. He has many years of experience in rail policy work, and has a wide knowledge of European rail freight and transport generally, the challenges across all member states, and the need to find solutions to the funding, congestion, emissions, and service quality of the transport sector. He was chair of the European Commission’s RU Dialogue Subgroup on access to rail facilities that provided the industry input to the legislation.

He is a Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Transport, and Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the UK. He speaks French and some German.

Alan Whitehead

Alan Whitehead is the member of parliament for Southampton Test and Shadow Minister for Energy and the Green New Deal. He has been the MP for Test since his election in 1997.

Alan graduated with a degree in Politics and Philosophy from Southampton University and went on to achieve a Ph.D. in Political Science. In 1980 he became a city councillor and then Leader of the Council when Labour took control in 1984.

He worked in research for two national charities during the 1980s and early 90s, and in 1992, came off the council and became Professor of Public Policy at Southampton Institute (now Southampton Solent University).

He was first nominated by the Labour Party to stand for Southampton Test in the early 1980s, made solid progress in the seat in 1987 and 1992, and finally won in 1997. Alan was re-elected as the Labour MP for Southampton Test in 2015 with an increased majority. This was only the third time in the constituency’s history where it bucked the national trend by electing an MP from a different party to the one that would go on to form a government. Alan was re-elected with an increased majority in 2017.

Jonathan Spruce

Jonathan is a Chartered Engineer with 30 years’ experience at a senior level in both industry leading consultancies and local authorities.

His specialism is in taking conceptual projects through the initial design stages and securing funding, as well as supporting their delivery on site. He is also Chair of the Institution of Civil Engineers’ National Transport Expert Panel.

Nuin-Tara Key

Nuin-Tara Key is Director, North America Public Sector Lead in WTW’s Climate and Resilience Hub (CRH). Nuin-Tara recently joined WTW to lead up CRH’s North America public sector efforts, working with public agencies to better manage climate risks, transition to a net zero economy, and build equitable community resilience in a rapidly changing world.

Previous to WTW, Nuin-Tara worked in the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR), where she served as a gubernatorial appointee under Governors Brown and Newson, and most recently served as Deputy Director for Climate Resilience. While at OPR, Nuin-Tara built California’s first integrated climate adaptation and resiliency program, leveraging local, state, tribal, and federal partnerships to scale climate adaptation solutions. Prior to joining OPR, Nuin-Tara co-founded an international initiative on community-based climate action and has worked in the public, private, and non-profit sectors on sustainable urban and regional planning and policy, with a focus on social equity and climate change. She has a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University and a BA in Political Science from Lewis and Clark College.