Climate Equity Reference Project Canada is a non-profit limited corporation incorporated in Ontario, Canada.
The current members of the board of directors are listed below.
Mark Lutes, Chair of the Board
Mark Lutes is a Senior Policy advisor for international climate change policy at WWF, based in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has engaged in climate change policy at the national and international level in Canada and Brazil for more than 20 years and previously served as Chair of the Climate Action Network’s Finance and Bunkers Working Groups.
Mohamed Adow, Board Secretary
Mohamed Adow is the Director and Founder of Power Shift Africa, a newly formed African non-governmental organization and think tank providing cutting edge analysis, solution focused policy and media engagement to mobilize climate action in Africa and leverage Africa’s voice internationally. Mohamed has worked for 18 years in the international development and environmental sectors, specializing in climate justice and clean energy.
For over a decade, Mohamed has lead Christian Aid’s global climate policy and advocacy work specializing in developing countries issues, and supporting the organization’s climate policy and advocacy work in Africa, Europe and at the UNFCCC where he engages and influences governments and other stakeholders in favor of the world’s poor people and countries. He is a graduate of Environmental Studies.
Rixa Schwarz, Board Treasurer
Rixa Schwarz is co-team leader for International Climate Policy and supervises the topics adaptation and resilience, mitigation and international partnerships at the German development organization Germanwatch. She follows the UN climate negotiations and has lead projects on climate and security and international NGO dialogues. Furthermore, she has long-standing work experience in India, where she spends substantial parts of the year working on climate education as well as climate and energy politics.
Rixa is also spokesperson of the working group on Climate Change and Development of the Association of German Development and Humanitarian Aid NGOs and a member of the Political Coordination Group of Climate Action Network International.
Tom Athanasiou
Tom Athanasiou is a writer, critic, speaker, project manager, and organizer. He is also a climate-equity specialist. He directs EcoEquity, a small San-Francisco-area activist research group, and co-directs the Climate Equity Reference Project, a long-term modeling and analysis initiative designed to advance equity as a driver of extremely ambitious global climate mobilization. His principle political goal is to ensure that the global climate transition is fair enough, and ambitious enough, to actually succeed.
In a former life, Tom was a programmer and technical writer; he long worked at Sun Microsystems. He’s been active in the climate negotiations for far longer than he cares to admit. He is the author of Divided Planet: the Ecology of Rich and Poor, and the co-author of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming and Greenhouse Development Rights: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World. He is writing a new book, the working title of which is No Easy Way: Climate Emergency, Internationalism, and the Crisis of Inequality.
Sivan Kartha
Sivan Kartha is a Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute US Centre in Boston, and Co-leader of an institute-wide theme Reducing Climate Risks. His research and publications for the past twenty years have focused on technological options and policy strategies for addressing climate change, and he has concentrated most recently on equity and efficiency in the design of an international climate regime. Recently, he has focused much of his effort on the Climate Equity Reference Project (CERP), which he co-directs. The CERP approach to burden-sharing in the global climate regime places the urgency of the climate crisis in the context of the equally dire development crisis afflicting the world’s poor majority.
Dr. Kartha has also worked on mitigation scenarios, market mechanisms for climate actions, and the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of biomass energy. His work has enabled him to advise and collaborate with diverse organizations, including the UNFCCC Secretariat, various United Nations and World Bank programs, numerous government policy-making bodies and agencies, foundations, and civil society organizations throughout the developing and industrialized world. He is an author on the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (Working Group III), co-leading the chapter on Sustainable Development and Equity.
He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University in 1993.
Dale Marshall
Dale Marshall is National Program Manager for Environmental Defence Canada. He has almost 20 years of experience working in environmental protection, the vast majority on climate change and energy issues. Most of Dale’s work has been in policy advocacy and campaigning. However, Dale also developed VSO International’s climate change strategy, with a focus on adaptation, and spent two years in Cambodia building the capacity of local NGOs to integrate climate change impacts and adaptation into their programs.
Dale has a Master’s in Resource and Environmental Management from Simon Fraser University, a B.Sc. in Environmental Science and Biology from the University of Western Ontario and a Mechanical Engineering degree from McGill University. Dale grew up in Sept-Iles, Quebec and now lives in Ottawa.