Comisión para la Cooperación Ambiental

Responsible for various environmental portfolios at the World Bank since 2000, Renan Poveda has been a project manager and the senior environmental specialist for the Latin American region, responsible for the development of environmental programs related to air quality, water and sanitation, contaminated sites and solid waste management in the Andean region, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the Southern Cone. Since 2014, Poveda has been in charge of the World Bank’s environmental agenda in Mexico.

Among the key activities he has led at the Bank are: (i) the design and preparation of the program for environment policy reform in Peru; (ii) the study of the environmental and social dimensions of the mining sector in Peru; (iii) the National Environmental Program in Brazil; (iv) the implementation of the Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin Sustainable Development Project in Argentina (judged as one of the 10 most polluted rivers in the world); and (v) the solid waste management agendas for Argentina and Mexico, where the importance of addressing food loss and waste as part of the Bank’s strategic and operational work has been emphasized.

Before joining the World Bank, Poveda was a research fellow at the East-West Center in the University of Hawaii. He supervised and coordinated the environmental education programs at Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Education in Mexico (SEP) and worked as an environmental specialist at the Secretariat of Ecology and Urban Development (SEDUE), also in Mexico. His academic studies were at the University of California at Berkeley and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University (Boston) in environmental policy and economics.

David Donaldson is Program Manager for Green Growth at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), where he works to ensure the successful implementation of CEC efforts on transportation, clean energy, and sustainable production and consumption, including the North American Initiative on Food Waste Reduction and Recovery. David holds a Master’s degree in agricultural economics from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Before joining CEC, David worked fifteen years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the regulation of pesticides and chemicals that deplete the ozone layer.

Gustavo Alanís Ortega received his law degree from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where since 1994 he has taught the environmental law course as a full professor at the law school. Alanís Ortega also holds a master’s degree in international law from the Washington College of Law, American University, Washington, DC. Since August 1993, he has been president of the Centro Mexicano de Derecho Ambiental (Mexican Environmental Law Center—CEMDA), a public interest environmental law firm based in Mexico City. He is also active as a columnist for El Universal, one of Mexico’s most widely read and influential newspapers; and columnist for the bimonthly journal Derecho ambiental y ecología published by the Centro de Estudios Jurídicos y Ambientales (CEJA). He is a member of the seventh cohort of the Leadership on Environment and Development Program (LEAD) of El Colegio de México.

Alanís Ortega serves on the boards of directors of the Inter-American Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA) and the World Commission on Environmental Law (CEL) of the IUCN Environmental Law Programme. He is also a member of the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW), the Climate Change Advisory Committee in Mexico, and the Environmental Law Advisory Group at the Department of Sustainable Development of the Organization of American States (OAS). Between April 2008 and January 2015, appointed by the Mexico City Legislative Assembly, he served on the Citizen Board of the Office of the Environmental and Zoning Prosecutor (Procuraduría Ambiental y del Ordenamiento Territorial—PAOT) and, from 2009 to 2016, he was part of the Public Participation Group of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), which contributed to make the company more socially responsible.

In December 2012, Alanís-Ortega was named to the CEC’s Joint Public Advisory Committee (JPAC) for the third time, having previously served from 2001 to 2004 and 2008 to 2011.

With more than 20 years’ experience in public administration, José Jaime Slomianski Aguilar was appointed to direct Mexico City’s Agency of Urban Management in September 2016. Over the course of his extensive career as a civil servant, he has held positions as general director for Coordination of Judicial Administration and Public Security in the Office of the Attorney General for the Federal District, general director of the Institute of Administrative Verification for the Federal District, coordinator of standards and legal affairs in the wholesale market (Central de Abasto), and general director of urban services in the Secretariat of Public Works and Services of Mexico City.

Slomianski Aguilar studied for the licentiate in law at the Benito Juárez Autonomous University (Oaxaca, Mexico), graduating with honor. He also holds a master’s in government and public policy from Universidad Panamericana, and an international master’s degree on the Mexican penal system from the Universidad de Girona (Spain).

Craig Coker is an environmental scientist and engineer with over 38 years of experience in the planning, permitting, design, construction, and operation of organics recycling facilities that process a wide variety of wastes, using several composting and digestion technologies, as well as in the marketing and sales of compost and compost-amended horticultural products. In addition to running Coker Composting and Consulting, he is a senior editor at BioCycle magazine. Coker has worked on developing composting facilities in North America, the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. He has an undergraduate degree in environmental science from the University of Virginia and a graduate degree in sanitary engineering from George Washington University.

With 15 years of experience in the environmental domain of the petroleum and chemical industries, Sergio Gasca Álvarez serves now as director of bioenergetics for Mexico’s Secretariat of Energy (Sener). He has also had broad experience in the formulation of environmental policies for solid waste management and—also in solid waste—has held supervisory positions in the Mexico City government as well as at the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat).

Gasca Álvarez studied biology in the Faculty of Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and holds a master of sciences and environmental engineering from the Autonomous Metropolitan University of Azcapotzalco. A graduate of the Program of Advanced Studies in Sustainable Development and Environment (LEAD-Mexico) of El Colegio de México and the Rockefeller Foundation, he also did further technical studies in the treatment of waste water in Germany.

Professor and Loblaw Chair in Sustainable Food Production
University of Guelph

Ralph C. Martin grew up on a beef and hog farm in Wallenstein, Ontario. He holds bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees in biology from Carleton University and a PhD in plant science from McGill University. His love of teaching came about unexpectedly while teaching at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, in 1990, and realized how students teach him, too.  In 2001, he founded the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada, based at Dalhousie University’s Agricultural Campus, to coordinate university research and education pertaining to organic systems across Canada. From 2011 to 2016, he was the Loblaw Chair in Sustainable Food Production, at the University of Guelph, where he is still a professor.

A consultant with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Mexico, Daniela Ruehl is the FAO-México focal point on food loss and waste and now coordinator of the FAO project on food loss measurement, in collaboration with the Mexican Agriculture Ministry. She has designed and implemented a food security observatory, contributed to a program to improve inclusion of the marginalized poor in rural areas, and worked to establish monitoring and early warning systems to detect climate impacts on food production (ASIS).

In 2012, Ruehl collaborated with the International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC) of the United Nations Development Program in Brazil, helping to design an internationally comparable inclusive growth index. In 2010, she worked for the German Interntional Cooperation (GIZ) in Kenya on designing and piloting an Agricultural Business Index for small-scale farmers.

Born in Mexico, Ruehl grew up in Brazil. She holds a bachelor of science degree in economics from the University of Münster (Germany) and received her master’s of science in economics, with specializations in macro- and developmental economics, at the Institute for Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, where she developed her professional interest in projects to aid the social and economic development of Latin American countries.

Yolanda A. Soto, President & CEO, became the first executive director of Borderlands Food Bank in 1995. Borderlands is a nonprofit organization with the mission of helping to feed the vulnerable nutritiously, through local, state, and out-of-state partnerships with hundreds of community organizations. She has guided Borderlands in rescuing millions of pounds of fresh, nutritious produce that otherwise would have been dumped into local landfills. Every year, Borderlands rescues approximately 30-40 million pounds of fresh produce and distributes it through hundreds of nonprofit organizations in 23 states in the US, and internationally, to local residents. The Non-Profit Times awarded her as one of the most influential people of 2015 because of the Arizona produce distribution program known as P.O.W.W.O.W. (Produce on Wheels WithOut Waste), a program which should be taken as a model by other states rescuing produce.

Soto lives in Nogales, Arizona, where she grew up. She has dedicated the majority of her life helping the less fortunate with many issues; but the problem of waste and hunger is closest to her heart because she believes that the most basic of human needs and rights is to eat nutritiously.

In addition to his consulting work in human resources for the law firm Oliva Hernández Abogados, Rubén Antonio Oliva Rodríguez is the general director of the Food Bank of Mexico (BAMX), a private assistance association whose network links more than 60 food collection businesses. Previously, from 2012 to 2014, he was human resources counselor in the Guadalajara Diocesan Food Bank, and currently works on a legal initiative that promotes a fiscal incentive of 15% for large donors in the country. Oliva Rodríguez studied business administration at the University of Guadalajara and holds a diploma in human resources from the ICAMI Center for Training and Development.

A member of Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National System of Researchers) and certified in hazardous waste management by the Bureau of Investments and Technical Support of Sweden, María Cristina Cortinas Durán furnishes advice on hazardous waste management to political and legislative authorities on both the federal and state levels in Mexico. She has formulated, for example, technical proposals for laws and regulations, such as the Ley General para la Prevención y Gestión Integral de los Residuos (General Act for the Prevention and Integral Management of Wastes), which have been adopted, both as laws and associated regulations, by the states of Guanajuato, Guerrero, Morelos, Querétaro and Quintana Roo. Among other duties, she has been the general technical coordinator for National Implementation Plan responding to the Stockholm Convention, in the Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (Semarnat). In recent years she has worked on a project for the Inter-American Development Bank with the goal of integrating Mexico’s Plan Estratégico Sectorial para la Gestión Integral de los Residuos Sólidos (Sectoral Strategic Plan for the Integral Management of Solid Waste) with two projects of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (German Association for International Cooperation). At present, she is collaborating with the Instituto Nacional de Ecología y Cambio Climático (National Institute for Ecology and Climate Change) and Japan’s Agency for International Cooperation, participating in conferences and as a technical advisor in international courses on instrumentation in integral management of solid waste oriented on the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle).

A biologist from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico), in whose Institute for Biomedical Research she studied the genetic effects of chemical substances and pollutants for two decades, she holds a doctorate in science from the University of Paris. She has written books and numerous articles on environmental health and the management of wastes and hazardous materials, several of which are available on her webpage: www.cristinacortinas.org.

Melissa Lenczewski is the director of the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on organic pollution, polluted groundwater, and the changes in microorganisms associated with pollution, particularly centered on the impacts of tourist activities on groundwater in Yucatán, Mexico. She also studies the microorganisms associated with steel slag pollution of groundwater in a hyper-alkaline environment (pH levels up to 13.3) in Calumet, Illinois.