Drawdown Georgia Founding Partners
October 16, 2020
John A. Lanier
John A. Lanier joined the Ray C. Anderson Foundation as Executive Director in May 2013.
He serves on the Board of Directors for Southface, the southeast's nonprofit leader in research, design, and implementation of a regenerative economy.
Marilyn Brown
Marilyn Brown is a Regents' and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. She joined Georgia Tech in 2006 after a distinguished career at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she led several national climate change mitigation studies and became a leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States.
Daniel Rochberg
Daniel Rochberg is Chief Strategy Officer of Emory University’s Climate@Emory initiative, an Instructor in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health, and a co-founder of the Georgia Climate Project. Daniel spent seventeen years with the U.S. Department of State, where he served as Special Assistant to the lead U.S. climate negotiators under Presidents Bush and Obama and was a member of U.S. delegations to multiple UN conferences, including the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the 2009 UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, and helped shape the President’s Global Climate Change Initiative and the U.S.-India Partnership to Advance Clean Energy.
Marshall Shepherd
Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd is a leading international expert in weather and climate and is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. Dr. Shepherd serves as Director of the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Atmospheric Sciences Program and Full Professor in the Department of Geography where he was a previous Associate Department Head.
Blair Beasley
Blair Beasley is a consultant for Emory University supporting the Drawdown Georgia Research and Communications Teams. Her background is in energy and climate policy at the federal and state levels. She previously worked with the Energy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., most recently as the project’s acting director.
Kim Cobb
Dr. Kim Cobb is a climate scientist specializing in past climate extremes, sea level rise, and climate communication. She is the Georgia Power Chair and Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and serves as the Director of the Global Change Program at Georgia Tech. She is a Lead Author for the upcoming Sixth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Michael Oxman
Michael Oxman has extensive experience in corporate sustainability within industry and consulting on topics such as social license to operate, reporting, and stakeholder engagement. Michael currently serves as the Managing Director and Professor of the Practice for the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of business where he also teaches a sustainability consulting practicum course.
Alice Rolls
Alice Rolls is the Executive Director of Georgia Organics, the oldest nonprofit in the state providing support to organic farmers and connecting local produce to local families. She previously served as Executive Director of Earth Share, a Georgia environmental organization she founded in 1992.
Beril Toktay
Dr. L. Beril Toktay is a leading international expert in sustainable operations and supply chain management. She is Professor of Operations Management and Brady Family Chairholder in the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. Dr. Toktay serves as the Faculty Director of the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business and Executive Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain.
Katharine Wilkinson
Dr. Katharine Wilkinson is an author, teacher, co-founder of The All We Can Save Project, and editor-in-chief at Project Drawdown. Her publications on climate include The Drawdown Review, Drawdown, Between God & Green, and the new bestseller All We Can Save. In 2019 Time magazine named her one of 15 “women who will save the world.”
About Drawdown Georgia
Informed by Project Drawdown, the world’s leading resource for climate solutions, Drawdown Georgia is the first state-centered effort to crowdsolve for climate change. The goal is to catalyze and scale 20 high impact solutions so Georgia can do its part to advance Drawdown -- that point in the future when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline.
The Drawdown Georgia roadmap was vetted by an expert team of Georgia-based academics, climate scientists, and researchers led by Georgia Institute of Technology, in partnership with Emory University, Georgia State University and the University of Georgia. Drawdown Georgia estimates that the state's current carbon footprint is 125 megatons, with the potential to cut Georgia's carbon impact by about 35% in ten years, to 79 megatons.
The solutions are based on five focus areas with the best potential to create the most change in Georgia: Electricity, Transportation, Buildings & Materials, Food & Agriculture, and Land Sinks. Currently funded by the Ray C. Anderson Foundation, Drawdown Georgia is bringing climate solutions home. Visit our home page.
