Sally Uren

Biography

Sally is a sustainability expert and advocate and Chief Executive at Forum for the Future, an organisation with a mission to help accelerate a shift towards a sustainable future. She works with leading global organisations, businesses and foundations to address complex challenges and to help bring about transformational systemic change environmentally, socially and economically.

After completing a PhD in Environmental Studies exploring the effects of air pollution on semi-natural ecosystems, Sally began working to make sustainable change both in the private and nonprofit sectors. Now, at Forum for the Future, she works across a huge number of industries from apparel and shipping to food and energy. The Cotton 2040 initiative she works on helps to accelerate the mainstreaming of sustainably grown cotton, and Growing our Future is a collaborative project designed to reshape global supply chains to fight some of the challenges and inequalities affected by agriculture, from biodiversity to food poverty. Sally also helped initiate Net Positive, a coalition of leading businesses, all working to define the next wave of corporate sustainability. 

In speeches, Sally inspires audiences to consider a new way of doing business. As well as addressing the challenges around climate change and what needs to be done to sustain the physical environment, she argues that this can not be done without a thought to social equity. When reshaping a global supply chain for a more environmentally friendly end product, every step of the process also has to have a positive social and economic impact for it to be sustainable. Whether investors, consumers, policymakers or employees, Sally equips audiences with actionable ways they can take action to move the needle towards a more prosperous future for everyone. 

Beyond her role at the Forum Sally has written for a range of publications such as The Huffington Post and The Independent and acts as an advisor for several global businesses, including Kimberly Clark and Burberry. She is also developing a new School of System Change to create a global community and to give change agents the capabilities to lead their own change initiatives.