Speaker biographies: Belfast conference

Tom Hartley

Councillor Tom Hartley is the Lord Mayor of Belfast. He is a member of Sinn Féin and was elected Lord Mayor in June 2008. He is 62 years old and represents the Lower Falls area. Councillor Hartley has been involved with Sinn Féin for the last 40 years and this year will mark his 16th year as a member of Belfast City Council (having been elected in 1993 and having served on the Council ever since). He is a member of the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust Board and the Belfast Harbour Commissioners Board. He is a keen supporter of tourism initiatives and arts projects in Belfast. A familiar figure cycling throughout the city, Councillor Hartley is also an environmental campaigner and historian. He has written a number of books, including Written in Stone – about the history of the Belfast City Cemetery.

Hilary Sloan

Hilary is the Chair of the UN Association of Northern Ireland and a member of the UN Association of the UK’s Board of Directors. She has expertise in the areas of education and human rights. She initially taught in Dublin before going to Madras in South India where she was head of the English department in a teacher training college. On her return to Northern Ireland she lectured at Stranmillis Teacher Training College Belfast before moving on to teach English and adult literacy in the Northern Ireland Prison Service for 12 years. Until she retired in 2005, she was a lecturer in Communication Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. She has been on the Board of Directors of Enterprise Ulster and of Belfast Metropolitan College. Hilary is currently on the Belfast Education and Library Board and chairs the education (schools) committee for Belfast. In 2007 she was awarded the MBE for services to education in Northern Ireland. She has also served as Chairperson of Christian Aid’s Development Education Committee, and has been on the Management Committee of Belfast’s Centre for Global Education.

Dr Bernard Bulkin

Bernie sits on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, the government watchdog on sustainable development, and chairs its climate change, energy and transport group. He is also a member of the government’s energy board. Bernie is a leading voice on issues related to energy and environment, and was formerly Chief Scientist of BP. His activities span business, government advisory, and educational roles. He is Chairman of AEA Technology, a leading environmental consultancy, Chairman of Swedish company Chemrec AB, and a board member of Severn Trent plc and Accelergy Corporation. He is venture partner with Vantage Point, associated with their Clean Tech practice. He is a Professorial Fellow of New Hall, University of Cambridge, and serves on numerous charitable boards. He is the author of more than a hundred papers and two books.

Alex Evans

Alex is a non-resident fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University, where he runs CIC’s work on climate change and global public goods. From 2003 to 2006, Alex worked as Special Adviser to Hilary Benn MP, then Secretary of State for International Development. Prior to joining the Department for International Development (DFID), Alex worked in a range of other climate and energy-focused roles, including as the head of the climate and energy research programme of the Institute for Public Policy Research (2002-2003), as a specialist on emissions trading at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) (2002), as the communications director at the Global Commons Institute (2000-2002), and as a political consultant on climate and energy policy (1998-1999). He also co-edits www.globaldashboard.org, the global risk and foreign policy blog.

Claire Hanna

Claire is Campaigns and Communications Officer for Concern Worldwide and represents the agency on the Climate Change Coalition Northern Ireland. She recently visited Bangladesh to view the impact climate change is having on extremely poor communities that Concern works with. Claire is a participant in the British Council’s Challenge Europe project, which links climate advocates aged 18-35 in 15 countries and across all sectors, with the aim of bringing about a low-carbon future through changes to law, business practice and human behaviour.

Polly Higgins

Polly is a (non-practising) barrister and environmental activist. Polly advises on EU and international environmental law, with particular expertise in earth jurisprudence. She is a UK Associate of EnAct International, a consultancy that specialises in developing and strengthening governance systems that promote ecologically sustainable societies. For the past two years she has also worked closely with TREC-UK, a network of scientists and engineers, to advance the concept of building solar power plants in the desert to provide the world with clean electricity. Polly is the founder of Women in Sustainability and the Environment (WISE Women) – an international network that brings together women who are working on sustainability issues and the environment.

Trewin Restorick

Trewin is the founder and CEO of Global Action Plan – a charity that runs a wide range of practical sustainable development initiatives with companies, schools and community organisations. Global Action Plan has won several awards for its work, including the Third Sector Award for its communication campaigns on climate change and runner-up for the international Alcan Sustainability Award. Trewin is Chair of the DEFRA Compact Group, which is building better relationships between DEFRA and the voluntary sector. He is also Chair of the Environmental IT Leadership Team, is a trustee for the Centre for Environmental Education, and was recently trained as one of Al Gore’s UK climate change ambassadors. Trewin is a frequent media commentator on environmental issues, and has appeared on Channel 4 News, BBC Breakfast, national radio and CNN. Trewin previously worked for Friends of the Earth, where he was both Recycling Co-ordinator and Head of Marketing, and for Plymouth City Council and the Dartington Trust. When he was 17, he produced a series of youth programmes for BBC2 called ‘Something Else’.

Malachy Campbell

Malachy is Policy Officer at WWF Northern Ireland where, since 1999, he has worked on a number of different issues including climate change and energy policy, marine issues and the European Habitats Directive. He represents WWF Northern Ireland on the Northern Ireland Marine Task Force and the Climate Change Coalition Northern Ireland. Since 2006 Malachy has been a member of the Council for Nature Conservation and the Countryside, the statutory adviser on the environment to the Department of Environment.

Profesor Sue Christie

Sue has been Director of Northern Ireland Environment Link (NIEL) since 1992. A network of voluntary organisations working on the environment, NIEL facilitates the work of its 51 full members through information, publications, representation and policy work, and provides the secretariat for the Environmental Education Forum. Sue is an ecologist, originally from California but resident in Northern Ireland since 1982. She has worked in the voluntary environmental sector since 1984 – prior to joining NIEL, as Director of the Ulster Wildlife Trust and Project Manager for NI2000. Sue sits on various bodies in Northern Ireland, including the Strategic Waste Board, Forest of Belfast (Treasurer), Sustainable Northern Ireland Programme (Treasurer), Action Renewables and Tidy NI. In April 2002 she was appointed Visiting Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Ulster Coleraine.

Dr Tim Walker

Tim is Head of Waste Management at Belfast City Council, a post he has held for over 10 years. He is responsible for the provision and planning of its recycling and waste management services (excluding waste collection) and for the development and delivery of several environmental initiatives within the city. Tim is the current chair of the Northern Ireland branch of the Technical Advisors Group (which represents the principal technical and environmental officers in Northern Ireland’s councils) and represents NILGA (Northern Ireland Local Government Association) on several waste-related topics, including the Department of Environment (DOE) Strategic Waste Board. Previously, Tim was the local chair for both the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) and the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment. Until 2005, Tim also represented the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) on the Waste Management Advisory Board (which oversaw the DOE’s implementation of the earlier Waste Strategy for Northern Ireland) and currently he sits on CIWEM’s national Waste Policy Group. In 2007, Tim was elected to the local CIWEM branch in Northern Ireland. Tim has a PhD in public sector performance management from the University of Ulster.

John Woods

John is Director of Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland where he leads a team of five staff and a network of local groups and volunteers in campaigning for a society based on environmental justice and the principles of sustainable development. He is a member of the senior management team of Friends of the Earth (England, Wales and Northern Ireland) and has observer status on the board of Friends of the Earth Ireland. John graduated from Edinburgh University in 1980, returning in 1991 to obtain an MSc in Social and Public Policy. In the course of his varied career he has also worked in the property business; helped found a youth development NGO in Scotland and an environmental NGO in Nepal; and served as Friends of the Earth Scotland’s Senior Campaigner. He returned to his native Northern Ireland in 1994 and became Director of New Agenda, a network established to coordinate civil society input into the political talks process. John is a Lay Magistrate.