Advisory Council

Prof. Mike Berners-Lee

Prof. Mike Berners-Lee is a leading thinker on the systemic change needed to tackle climate breakdown. He is the founder and director of Small World Consulting Ltd and is the author of acclaimed books including There is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years, and How Bad Are Bananas? The carbon footprint of everything.

Mike is a professor at Lancaster University, where his research includes supply chain carbon modelling, sustainable food systems and the environmental impact of ICT. He has made numerous speaking, radio and television broadcast appearances to promote public awareness of sustainability and climate change issues.

Joel Cadbury

Joel is an entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Together with his business partner, Ollie Vigors, he has developed a wide range of leisure and property. Since Longshot’s foundation in 1994 these have included Vingt-Quatre, London’s first and only 24 hour restaurant, the iconic media business The Groucho Club, The Third Space – the health club which incorporated an organic supermarket and London’s largest Integrated Centre of Medicine, as well as being voted the Number 1 Health Club in the World.

More recently, Joel is a co-founder of Beaverbrook, the former home of Lord Beaverbrook. It has been transformed into a World Class Golf Club & Hotel and recently ranked in the top 100 of hotels in the world by Traveller & Leisure Magazine.

Joel also has various personal investments and has served on the board or advisory boards of a wide variety of businesses including Save Money Cut Carbon, Sipsmith Independent Distillers and GDR Creative Intelligence.

Joel is committed to philanthropic work, most notably as Trustee and Chairman of The Royal Parks Foundation from 2004-2014. He was a longstanding Patron of Motor Neurone Disease Association and co-Founder of a National Wheelchair Service. He is a Patron of Maths in Action and a Trustee of St. Paul’s Knightsbridge Foundation, The Jennifer d’Abo Memorial Scholarship and UnLtd India. He is on the Board of London’s first Academy School, Capital City Academy, very involved in Arbourthorne Primary School in Sheffield and was previously an advisor to The University of Surrey. In 2019, he took on the role of Chairman of The Tree Council (https://treecouncil.org.uk/).

Mya-Rose Craig – Birdgirl

Mya-Rose (she/her), AKA Birdgirl, is a 21-year-old British-Bangladeshi birder, anti-racism, and environmental activist fighting to halt biodiversity loss and climate breakdown, whilst protecting indigenous rights and ensuring Global Climate Justice and a Just Transition for the Global South, especially for Bangladesh which is projected to be the country to suffer the most severe impact due to climate change and her Nanabhai’s village, which has suffered from numerous severe flooding.

Age 11 she started her blog, raising $35,000 to clean-up an oil spill in Bangladesh, was listed with Maisie Williams as one of Bristol’s most influential young people; age 14, she became a Bristol 2015 European Green Capital Ambassador, spoke at its climate rally, and set up her charity Black2Nature, which organises free nature camps for inner-city children of colour, campaigns for equal access to nature and to make the environmental sector ethnically diverse, and organised Race Equality in Nature Conferences with Bill Oddie in 2016 and Chris Packham in 2019. At 15 she appeared on a future sustainable cities panel with George Monbiot and Caroline Lucas.

At 17, she is the youngest Briton to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science. Her awards include BBC Women’s Hour No 4 Female Environmentalist 2021 and NatGeo Young Explorer.

Visiting the Ecuadorian Amazon age 8, she saw how colonialism was devastating the lives of indigenous peoples. Her EPQ “The racist origins of conservation and its impact on Indigenous Peoples today” was published in Resurgence in 2019.

In 2020 she spoke with Greta Thunberg in front of 40,00 people, talking about Global Climate Justice and the impact on her family in Bangladesh: travelled to the Arctic with Greenpeace to highlight the melting of the Arctic Sea ice, interviewed Heads of State at the UN Biodiversity Summit, and took part in the most northerly youth strike with photos going viral around the world. She was also featured in Rebel Girls “Climate Warriors”.

She has published three books, We Have a Dream in which she amplifies the voices of 30 young environmentalists of colour from around the planet, Flight a children’s book about bird migration, and her memoir Birdgirl about growing up with her mother’s bipolar disorder, the impact on her and how being out in nature helps; receiving five award nominations; including winning the Somerset Maugham award.

She has attended meetings at Downing Street, spoken at Parliamentary events, and with Emma Watson, Fearne Cotton, also at Billie Eillish Live; appearing on TV and radio news and programmes like The One Show and NBC’s Today. She has appeared in all the major newspapers, and many magazines, such as, Dazed, Elle, Vanity Fair and Time. She is an ambassador for The Wildlife Trust, Greenpeace, Oxfam and Survival International.

She is currently at St John’s College, Cambridge University, studying HSPS.

Dr. Alan Jamieson

Dr Alan Jamieson is a senior lecturer in deep-sea biology at Newcastle University, UK. He is the Chief Scientist on the 5-Deeps Expedition. His research has made him a world leader in the biological exploration of the hadal zone (depths exceeding 6000 metres).

He has designed multiple Hadal-Landers and has deployed them over 350 times in the ultra-deep subduction trenches and surrounding areas in all oceans. He has participated in, and often led, over 60 deep-sea expeditions covering every ocean and has been lucky enough to dive every ocean in a full ocean depth rated submersible. He has published over 80 scientific papers and sole authored the book The Hadal Zone, life in the deepest oceans, in 2015. The highlights of his work include filming the deepest fish in the world multiple times, discovering supergiant amphipods in the hadal zone, having a hadal species named after him and filming in the deepest places on Earth, the Sirena Deep and Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

His work has featured in the BBC’s Blue Planet II, NHKs Deep Ocean, Descent into the Mariana Trench documentaries and the forthcoming Discovery Channel’s Deep Planet series. His discoveries have received extensive international media coverage, in particular his work on the discovery of anthropogenic contaminants and microplastics particles and fibres residing within organisms from the deepest places on earth.

Mr. Uday Khemka

Mr. Uday Khemka is Vice-Chairman of the SUN Group of Companies, a diversified family-owned, investment and industrial group headquartered in India with activities in varied emerging markets in new and renewable energy, electric mobility, natural resources, real estate, electronics/aerospace and private equity. Prior to the SUN Group, Uday worked at Credit Suisse First Boston and Morgan Stanley in London and New York, and then established and headed up Morgan Stanley’s activities in India. Uday has been on the boards of all SUN Group companies and has been responsible for the establishment of the investment management activities of the group.

Uday is also Vice Chairman of The Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation, the first, and still one of the only, foundations in India to focus centrally on climate change mitigation, which it has done for 30 years, since COP1 in Rio in 1992. He was also previously the Co-Chair of the Clean Energy Finance Forum (CEFF) jointly established by Prime Minister Modi and President Obama to catalyse investment towards India’s 175 GW clean energy target for 2022. Among other climate philanthropic endeavours, Uday resourced the entry of the Climate Group into India and has been on its board ever since. Uday’s key policy interests focus on large scale institutional climate finance (with respect to which he has been advising associations of sovereign and pension institutions since 2004), renewable energy policy and government policy to promote the electrification of transportation. Uday is also a Senior Climate Advisor (2019 to date) to the Institutional Investors Roundtable, a group of 45 of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund representing over $13 trillion.

Uday’s philanthropic interests outside the field of climate change mitigation include his work as co-founder of Just Giving (which became Europe’s leading online charity fundraising portal), his leadership of Youth Reach (focusing on street and slum children in India) and the Nabha Foundation (rural development in India).

Uday is on the Board of Governors of the Indian School of Business and the Public Health Foundation of India, the Board of Directors of the Synergos Institute in New York and the Board of Advisors of the Climate Group in India and has been elected a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Uday has recently been appointed on the Advisory Board of the Smith School of Enterprise & the Environment at Oxford University. He is also a member of HRH Prince’s Sustainable Markets Initiative and Senior Climate Advisor to the Institutional Investors Roundtable.
Today, Uday leads the New Energy activities of the Group which include renewable energy, energy storage and electric mobility energy infrastructure. His passion for New Energy led him to set up SUN New Energy Holdings, which today includes SUN Mobility (aiming to be a global leader in electric mobility energy infrastructure), in a partnership with Chetan Maini, as well as SUN Renewables.

Educated at Eton College and Cambridge University, Uday received an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar).

Prof. Callum Roberts

Callum Roberts is Professor of Marine Conservation in the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall campus. His research focuses on threats to marine ecosystems and species, and on finding the means to protect them. Callum’s main interests include documenting the impacts of fishing on marine life, both historic and modern, and exploring the theory and practical effectiveness of marine protected areas for conservation and fisheries management.

For the last few decades Callum has used science to make the case for stronger protection for marine life at both national and international levels. His research group designed half a million square kilometres of marine protection in the North Atlantic that was established by OSPAR in 2010. They also provided the scientific underpinning for a new ocean protection target – 30% marine protected areas by 2030 – which is gaining widespread support as a follow-on to the UN’s target of 10% by 2020.

Callum is also an author. The Unnatural History of the Sea (Island Press) charts the effects of thousands of years of exploitation on ocean life. In a second book, Ocean of life: how our seas are changing (Penguin Books), Callum shows that the oceans are changing faster, and in more ways, than at any time in human history, and sets out a series of reforms that could lead to a more sustainable future. He wrote Secrets of the Seas (Bloomsbury) with the award winning photographer, Alex Mustard, which showcases some of the most beautiful wildlife and places in the sea through glorious images. Callum’s latest book, Reef Life (Profile Books), is on the past and precarious future of the world’s richest marine ecosystem, coral reefs.

Callum was chief scientific advisor for the BBC television’s flagship series Blue Planet II. He works extensively with ocean conservation charities and is Chief Scientific Advisor to – and trustee of – BLUE Marine Foundation. In addition, Callum is a WWF UK Ambassador, on the board of the Nekton Deep Ocean Research Institute, scientific advisor to the Maldives Coral Institute and advisor to the Pew Bertarelli Global Ocean Legacy Program.

Callum’s book, Ocean of Life, inspired Another Way’s founder, Amy, to start her conservation journey when she was 12.

Jo Ruxton MBE

Jo Ruxton is a passionate campaigner for the Ocean. After achieving her BSc Hons in Biological Sciences from the London University, her career in conservation took off in the ‘90’s when she started the first marine programme for WWF in Hong Kong, where she lived for 14 years.  During that time, she was a key advocate for the establishment of the first marine protected areas there.

She was a lead member of the BBC Natural History Unit’s diving team for many years and has been producing and directing underwater sequences since the first days of filming on the award-winning Blue Planet series in 1997.  During her 12 years at the BBC she was involved in numerous underwater films from Antarctica to the pristine reefs of the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean for the BBC and the Discovery Channel.

Recognising the need to increase the conservation messages in the BBC films she worked on, Jo decided to leave to work independently. When she started to hear about the devastating problem of plastic waste in the ocean, she knew she had to tell the story of the ocean as it really was, and not how the beautiful wildlife documentaries portrayed it to be.  She began to raise the funds needed to make the film, A Plastic Ocean and it took 2 years just to get the filming started.  The more she learned about the subject the more determined she was to tell the story as research was revealing a much bigger problem than she had ever imagined.  It was 8 years before her multi-award-winning film, A Plastic Ocean, was finally released in 2017 in more than 70 countries and in 15 languages.

Jo is the Founder of Ocean Generation (UK registered Charity No. 1139843 (formerly Plastic Oceans)). Ocean Generation exists to restore a healthy relationship between humanity and our Ocean, by tackling ocean threats through science and storytelling. Their youth engagement programmes are empowering young people to fall in love with our Ocean and to find their own unique way to safeguard it in their daily lives and throughout their careers.

Jo is an experienced and engaging speaker who has addressed audiences from schools to corporations, in parliaments and government establishments and to audiences throughout the world after screenings of her film.  She was invited to speak at COP 26 in Glasgow and during the G7 summit in Cornwall and has been involved in several brand ambassador and influencer campaigns with companies including Longchamp and Guess.

Awards and accolades

Jo was awarded the MBE for Services to Marine Conservation in the Queen’s 2022 New Year’s Honours.

Featured in the 2018 Sunday Times, ‘Alternative Rich List’ – celebrating people who are rich in different ways.  https://www.thetimes.co.uk/spon/alternative-rich-list/

Winner 2018 Daily Telegraph ‘Pioneering Woman of the Year’

Jo was listed by British Airways as one of the ‘100 Modern Britons who helped shape our country’ in celebration of their 100-year anniversary in 2019.  Copy and paste this link to watch here:https://youtu.be/khXIOFdWrTc

Jo lives in Cornwall close to her daughters and granddaughters and when not diving on location she enjoys cold-water sea swimming, whatever the season.

Prof. Steve Simpson

Steve Simpson is Professor of Marine Biology and Global Change at the University of Bristol, UK.

Steve teaches marine biology to hundreds of undergraduates and Masters students, leads a thriving research group consisting of postdocs, PhD and Masters students, and runs an MSc in Science Communication for a Better Planet.

Steve’s work focusses on ocean acoustics (from fish communication to noise pollution), impacts of global change (including ocean warming, ocean acidification and overfishing), and coral reef restoration. He has active projects in the UK, Australia, Maldives, French Polynesia and the Caribbean. Steve was an academic advisor and featured scientist on the BBC’s Blue Planet II, and regularly gives public lectures (e.g. TEDx, COP27) and media interviews on marine biology, global impacts and potential solutions. He remains optimistic that we can work together to preserve the oceans for future generations.