With less than a month to go to the world's first Net Zero Festival, BusinessGreen can today confirm over 100 top business leaders, politicians, academics, and campaigners are set to appear at the virtual summit
The full speaker line-up is almost complete. For three days from September 30th over 100 CEOs, leading sustainability executives, Ministers and MPs, academics, and activists will take part in the world's first Net Zero Festival, coming together to jointly explore how the net zero transition will define the coming decades for businesses of all shapes and sizes.
The virtual event, which will be broadcast from the BT Sport studios on Stratford, will feature a host of keynote addresses, wide-ranging panel debates, incisive interviews, and video documentaries, all focused on providing delegates with an invaluable insight into how to navigate and advance the rapid development of a net zero emission economy.
The Net Zero Festival digital platform will also enable a series of interactive workshops and virtual networking between delegates and speakers, as well as access to the scores of presentations, interviews, and panel debates on-demand after the event.
In addition, the Festival will continue throughout October with a series of fringe events, including the BusinessGreen Leaders Awards 2020 and the soon to be announced Net Zero Skills Summit, hosted in partnership with National Grid.
Confirmed speakers at the Festival include a host of top business leaders, such as BT chairman Jan du Plessis, former Unilever CEO Paul Polman, OVO Energy CEO and founder Stephen Fitzpatrick, Nicola Lovett, CEO for Engie UK and Ireland, We Mean Business CEO Maria Mendiluce, and Sinead Lynch, country chair at Shell.
They will be joined by senior politicians, such as Environment Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, and Tory MP and chair of PRASEG Bim Afolami, as well as high level champion for COP26 Nigel Topping and Environment Agency Chair Emma Howard Boyd.
Senior executives from a raft of top brands, trade bodies, and campaign groups will also contribute to the three days, including National Grid, Amazon, Energy UK, the UK Green Building Council, Triodos, the Green Finance Institute, Octopus Energy, CDP, Tesco, Drax, Schroders, and many others.
They will be joined by some of the UK's leading environmental campaigners, such as supermodel and sustainable fashion activist Arizona Muse, WWF UK's Tanya Steele, and Global Optimism's Tom Rivett-Carnac.
Hosts for the three days include some of the UK's most experienced broadcasters and journalists, such as Krishnan Guru-Murphy, Lucy Siegle, Robert Llewellyn, Leo Hickman, and BusinessGreen's James Murray.
Over three days covering the themes of net zero leadership, innovation, and culture these leading experts and inspirational speakers will address a wide range of business critical issues ranging from big picture questions over how to engineer a green recovery or manage stranded asset risks to practical guidance on how to set effective decarbonisation goals or deploy clean technologies.
"The Net Zero Festival will be the biggest event BusinessGreen has ever hosted and it will address the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity the world faces," said Murray. "We're really excited at the prospect of bringing together hundreds of leading experts to explore how the net zero transition can be accelerated and demonstrate how ever more businesses and investors are embracing clean technologies and urgently working to decarbonise the global economy.
"The aim is to provide as wide an audience as possible with invaluable guidance on how to seize the opportunities the net zero transition will offer, while also managing the risks that will come with one of the most dramatic and unpredictable decades in human history. We'd urge anyone who has not yet signed up to take part in the Net Zero Festival to do so now and secure their place at this critical event."
