Speakers

Dr. Madeleine Orr (she/her) is researcher, educator, and advocate working at the intersection of sport and climate change. After earning her PhD in Kinesiology from the University of Minnesota in 2020 and a postdoc in strategy at University of British Columbia, Orr joined the Institute for Sport Business at Loughborough University London where she developed the world’s first MSc in Sustainable Sport Business. In the Fall of 2023, she is joining the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor.

Maddy is the founder and co-director of The Sport Ecology Group, an international consortium of academics who drive climate action in the sport sector through research and public education initiatives. Her research in sport ecology examines the impacts of climate change on the sport sector, with a focus on resilience and adaptation. She has authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and several industry-facing reports that have gained global attention. Her work has been covered by the BBC, Time Magazine, ESPN, Sky Sports, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and more. Her first book Warming Up: How Climate Change is Changing Sports (for Bloomsbury) will publish in 2024.

For her contributions to the sport sector, Orr has been recognized by Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Corporate Knights’ 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders, and NAAEE’s 30 Under 30 Environmental Educators. She was the 2022 recipient of the Rising Alumni Award from the University of Minnesota and was named a Future of Canada Fellow in 2023.

Seán is the Climate Justice Officer with Bohemians – a first in the world of football. In this role, he is working with the club to design climate responses that can be both led by and empower the club’s fans and their communities. He also works as the secretariat member with responsibility for strategy with the Children’s Environmental Rights Initiative – a global coalition of organisations working to secure children’s right to a safe and healthy environment.

Over the past year, he has supported the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in the development of authoritative guidance to States on the protection of children’s rights with respect to the environment and climate change. Previously he worked with the former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, in seeking to advance climate justice within the UN system and subsequently authored The People’s Transition: Community-led Development for Climate Justice with the European Foundation for Progressive Studies and the Think Tank for Action on Social Change.

The People’s Transition is a participative decision-making model that views climate action as an enabler of local development and gives people and communities ownership of the transition to zero-carbon societies to tackle inequality and raise standards of living through the delivery of climate solutions. He has worked with the Environmental Protection Agency in Freetown, Sierra Leone and with communities facing extreme poverty in Kolkata, India.

Milton Kisapai comes from the Oceania country of Papua New Guinea. A national hockey athlete who has been in the sport for development for almost 10 years now.

He started as one of the first athlete volunteers with the Papua New Guinea Olympic Committee’s Sport & Environment Program called “Love Your Coast” in 2012. Since 2012, he helped with the LYC program by delivering and facilitating awareness with athletes & officials at different tournaments and competitions.  This led to him being actively engaged with other sport for development programs of the PNG Olympic Committee. But his passion lies with advocating for the environment using the power of sport.

In 2017, Milton was appointed one out of five athletes in Papua New Guinea as Team PNG SDG Champions. This was a partnership between the United Nations in Papua New Guinea and the PNG Olympic Committee to use athletes to advocate and promote the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Milton has so far led, coordinated and mobilized national athletes to be involved in a number of mangrove planting initiatives with key stakeholders in the environment sector in PNG.

Milton is now employed by the PNG Olympic Committee as Programs Coordinator, coordinating all sport for development programs and partnerships of the organization.

He is also a member of the UNESCO Asia/Pacific Youth, Sport & SDG Taskforce, after attending the Youth, Sport & SDG Funshop in Seoul, Korea in 2019. Milton will soon be pursuing his Master’s of International Development Practice with a focus on Sport for Development & Sport Diplomacy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Claudia Patricia Galindo Rodríguez, graduated in biology and Master in Conservation and Use of Biodiversity, my purpose is to work in processes of environmental sustainability oriented to the transformation and mitigation of threats to which biodiversity is exposed. I am a high performance athlete in the beach volleyball discipline (Colombian Selection) and through sport, I seek to generate tools that contribute to educational and social processes towards a vision and responsible action on the conservation of biodiversity, climate change and sustainable development

Zeina Hamarsha is a former goalkeeper for Jordan’s Women’s National Football Team. After hanging up her boots, she obtained her bachelor degree in Civil Engineering from The University of Jordan. During her undergrad Zeina worked as a competition officer for the FIFA U17 Women’s World cup Jordan 2016. After graduating, she worked as a civil engineer briefly before returning back to sport but on the managerial side. Zeina recently graduated from the top-ranked CIES/FIFA Master program in International management, law and humanities of sport. During her time at the Master, she and her team participated in the SportPro Media Hackathon, winning third place and the most financially sustainable concept for a project idea that focuses on the idea of future sustainable stadiums. Combining her backgrounds in sports and civil engineering, Zeina is passionate about leveraging technology to make all areas of sport more sustainable.

Arianna Criscione is a former professional football player having finished her career at Paris Saint-Germain where she had a dual role as player and as Women’s Sponsorship Manager for the past 2 seasons at the French club. Previously to joining PSG she played in Italy, France, Sweden, Netherlands and Norway, and earned several caps with the Italian Women’s National Team, as well as appearances in the UEFA Women’s Champions League.

She is now the Director of Women’s Football at N3XT Sports and uses her experience and creativity to help football stakeholders to build sustainable and accelerated blueprints that raise the women’s game.

Brita is a seasoned Sustainability manager, with experience from global brands, and has broad experience with managing risk, responsibility, and climate action in global supply chains as well as internal operations. Brita is specialized in building sustainability- and climate strategies by creating broad ownership and clear objectives, and has done so for private enterprises, government departments and international NGOs. She is now an advisor and head of international relations in SALT.

Brita holds an MSc in Business Administration and Development Management as well as a trained Climate Reality Leader by Al Gore. She is passionate about taking care of our common playgrounds while also seeing to make the shift happen on policy levels. She currently resides in the Lofoten Islands, while holding the active role as President for Protect our Winters Europe

Richard Lindsay is the Business Insights Manager for Birmingham County FA and the Project Lead for the Save Today, Play Tomorrow Programme, the first of its kind sustainability project in the UK looking at how to reduce the impact of grassroots football on the environment & implementing positive achievable solutions for the 1,200 volunteer led clubs that come under their membership.

Iva Glibo serves as a Committee Member for the Croatian Olympic Committee at ENGSO Youth, the only European organisation devoted to grassroots sport and youth. As part of her current role, she is responsible for the Sustainable Development Working Group. In addition, Iva has a keen interest in mental health through sport and physical activity. During the course of her regular workday, she is a doctoral candidate at the Technical University of Munich, researching sustainable development in international sport through a systems thinking perspective.

Jennifer Amann recently graduated from the University of Gothenburg with a Master of Science in Global Studies focusing on conflict resolution and sustainable development. Having started to look into the social and environmental commitment of German professional football clubs in 2018, she moved on to explore the potential of football fans in the fight against climate change as part of a research internship with Dr Mark Doidge from the University of Brighton. In her subsequent Master’s thesis she connected literature on mobilising climate action and football fandom to explore football fan communities’ potential to take collective climate action and bring about societal transformations using the UK-based charity Pledgeball as her case.

In addition to Pledgeball’s strategy, Jennifer’s research feeds into, for example, Spirit of Football’s The Ball journey, which aims to highlight the unequal impacts of climate change and possible solutions around the world. She’s a member of the Sport Ecology Group’s Graduate Mentorship Programme and has recently taken on the coordination of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) Environmental Working Group.

Sarah Hanffou, President of Ping sans Frontières (NGO created in 2006) is a French-Cameroonian with PHD in Public Law – Attorney in France. Her other sporting achievements include:
Team France:
Participation in the London Olympics and qualified for the Tokyo Olympics (Team Cameroon)
Participation in 7 World Championships
Ambassador of the International Table Tennis Federation Foundation (ITTF Foundation)
Member of the Athletes Commission of the International Table Tennis Federation
Member of the Incubator Paris 2024 / AFD
Team Cameroon:
African Champion 2010 – Team Bronze Medal 2010
Participation in the London 2012 Olympic Games
Silver medal at the 2019 African Games
Qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games
3rd place in the African Top 16 2020

She is also an Officer (captain) in the French Army (Land army) during 5 years (currently reservist).

Marisa Schlenker (USA /GER) – Community and program manager at the Yunus Sports Hub. With more than seven years experience in the sport for development sector, she has worked as a trainer, program manager, partnerships coordinator, gender specialist and more recently in monitoring, evaluation and learning roles.

She has a masters in sport for development and conflict resolution from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and is finishing her second masters at Konstanz University in Public Administration and Political Science. She has worked on many sustainability in sport research projects, is a member of the Sport Ecology Graduate Mentorship Programme, provides programme support to SandSI’s football4climate initiative and most recently joined the Sustainability Reference Group of the International Biathlon Union.

She is engaged in the FARE Network’s LGBTQI and Ethnic Minority Women in Football working groups. In 2018- 2019, she was the lead researcher of the EU funded Global Goals World Cup Erasmus + project.

A professional snowboarder and entrepreneur with passion for culture of going up and down the hill. At the heart of my lifestyle is movement, through which I find a connection to nature. With my own work, I want to highlight he different possibilities of moving around in nature and encouraging people to believe their own stories.

Oluseyi Smith BEng MSc OLY is a retired two-time summer (London-2012) and winter (Pyeongchang 2018) Olympian in Athletics and Bobsleigh. He remains involved in sport as a member of the IOC’s Sustainability & Legacy commission, as a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, and is an IOC Young Leader. Oluseyi is passionate about renewable energy research and projects, one of which is Racing to Zero (https://www.racingtozero.ca) which he developed through his IOC Young Leader mandate.
This project combines sustainability best practices with expert knowledge in grassroots, local, volunteer-run athletics meets.

Amalia is a marine scientist and outdoor enthusiast. She is passionate about conservation and bringing people together to increase ocean access and to protect the ocean. She is the Community Manager at I AM WATER Ocean Conservation, which uses the sport of snorkeling to protect the ocean

Dr. Jessica Murfree is an Assistant Professor of Sport Administration at the University of Cincinnati. Her research as a sport ecologist examines the effects of climate change on sport. Primarily, she explores these effects through social and legal implications of extreme weather, climate risks, and environmental injustices. To date, her expertise has informed organizations the United Nations Environment Programme, Climate Week NYC, and Ocean Conservancy. Her research has contributed to sport industry conversations in Forbes and Sports Illustrated and has been featured in outlets like Scientific American and The Athletic. Dr. Murfree was recognized as a 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Sports Honoree.

Ahmed Al-Shahrani was involved in a motor vehicle accident when he was 17, which caused paraplegia. Living with a physical disability for the last 16 years has not stopped him from pursuing and living a meaningful and fulfilling life. Born and raised in USA, his formative years and western education has served to bridge the gap between the East and West.

Ahmed was Accessible Qatar’s Ambassador for mobility impairment from 2016 to 2018 and organised and curated various events for the initiative. He has taken part in numerous community road accident awareness campaigns and has spoken in schools and colleges on the importance of road safety. Ahmed’s faith and positivity are the source of his strength, empowering him to defiantly refuse to be defined by his disability. He believes himself to be ‘Disabled but Definitely Able’ – as summed up at the Definitely Able conference.

Ahmed is active and energetic, and plays a number of sports such as wheelchair basketball, tennis, fencing, swimming, skeet shooting; and in 2016 participated in his first marathon. He launched the first fencing classes for wheelchair users in Qatar under his role as an Accessible Qatar Ambassador.

Linh Do is passionate about climate justice and social inequality. She’s spent the last decade working across advocacy and engagement, media and social enterprise. Linh is currently the Director of the Wattle Fellowship at the University of Melbourne and a board member at Climate Action Network Australia.

In the lead up to the Paris negotiations, she served as the publisher and editor-in-chief of The Verb. There she worked with a global team to localise and humanise stories from the UN climate change negotiations. Linh was most recently Australia and Pacific lead for The Climate Reality Project, Al Gore’s climate change leadership program, and brought over 800 people together in Brisbane during Climate Week Queensland.

Linh has worked with a wide array of individuals from high school students to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and the Reuters Foundation. She is a co-founder of the technology start-up OurSay, formerly led the community organising program at the Australian Conservation Foundation and has worked with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on communicating policy.

Linh is signed with Claxton Speakers and has previously sat on both non-profit and for-profit boards. Her work has been featured in Al Jazeera, Vogue, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post amongst others. She is a member of Global Shapers, an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

Rony Epelbaum is a young professional and former student-athlete from Mexico with a love for sport and nature. He earned a BSc in Sport Administration from the University of Miami in Florida, USA, and recently completed a semester of graduate study in Sustainable Development at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

As a young professional, Rony has collaborated with several sport stakeholders such as Olympic Games Organizing Committees (OCOGs), National Olympic Committees (NOCs), Sporting Federations (IFs), as well as professional athletes. His most recent project focused in the development and implementation of an Olympic pre-Games training camp in Tachikawa, Japan with 150 participants from 30 National Olympic Committees (NOCs) of the Americas, in preparation for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Through these collaborations, he developed first-hand awareness of sport’s potential to become a powerful catalyst for positive change.

In 2021, Rony founded Sport For The Wild, an initiative to design innovative and multilateral collaborations that value the influential power of sport to promote biodiversity conservation and rewilding.

Benjamin Tembo is the Character Development Coordinator at Ascent Soccer Academy in Malawi, South East of Africa. He is passionate about working with young people and building future leaders that are not only educated and ethical, but also aware of environmental sustainability. He graduated from The Masters University in California with an International Business Degree in 2019 and played four years of collegiate soccer.

Nevena works as communications and public affairs consultant at BCW in Brussels, working on sports and politics. She is part of the #BeActive team, managing the European Week of Sport’s communication campaign for the European Commission. Nevena is one of the co-founders of the Green Sports Hub Europe, pioneering sustainability efforts for European sports through the positive engagement of the multi-stakeholders.

Over the past ten years, she had an executive/advisory role within different sports bodies: ENGSO Youth, International School Sport Federation, and UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Youth and Sport Task Force, always at the forefront for giving youth a real say in sports. She has worked on the international development programmes for the Olympic Committee of Serbia and served as General Secretary for ENGSO Youth.

Nevena is connecting the dots across sectors. She is the specialist for strategic partnerships, specifically interested in climate diplomacy, digital diplomacy, and intercultural dialogue with empowered youth and girls at the heart of it. Nevena is UNAOC’s and UNMGCY’s alumni.

Nevena holds a master’s degree in international affairs and politics (University of Belgrade), Mini MBA (WPP), and is currently obtaining an executive certificate in Strategic Management of Innovations (HEC). After her sports career in athletics (running 400m) she pursued her passion for biking, beach volleyball, and water sports.