Comisión para la Cooperación Ambiental

Iman Berry is a third-year student at the Ivey School of Business at Western University and a board member of Green Ummah, working to bring green education to schools all over Canada. Iman was recently selected for the Young Nature Leadership grant by Nature Canada to help further Green Ummahs initiatives. Chosen as an Ontario Junior Citizen in 2019 for her various political involvements, Iman continued her interest as a student senator at Western University and as a board member for Western University’s Student Council. In addition, Iman has been heavily involved within the startup space, having helped to build three companies, and is currently working on creating a video game within the recruiting space.

Eduardo Lezama was born to immigrant parents in New York City and reared in Puebla, Mexico. Now 20 years old, Eduardo is in his second year of environmental studies at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His advocacy for environmental justice began at the Re-Earth Initiative, where he currently serves as an education coordinator. Eduardo’s work consists of informing youth about climate change and other environmental and social issues by leading the creation of toolkits.

Justin Onwenu, from Detroit, Michigan, is a student in Columbia University’s Law Class of 2024. In the summer preceding law school, he served as a White House Intern, assisting with speechwriting, external engagement, and executive order development research for the Council on Environmental Quality.

Previously, he served as a Detroit-based community organizer for the Sierra Club. This work included writing and advocating for city ordinances that protect drinking water sources, securing hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect school children from poor air quality, and leading emergency response efforts in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Appointed by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, he currently serves as the youngest member of the Michigan Advisory Council on Environmental Justice and Black Leadership. In 2020, he served as a Democratic National Committee Convention delegate and was appointed to the DNC’s Environment and Climate Crisis Council.

Economist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with a PhD in planning and development from the University of Liverpool’s Faculty of Social and Environmental Studies, Pedro Moctezuma Barragán is a prominent national and international activist on the issues of water, the environment and community participation. He is currently coordinator of the Sustainability Research Program at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) where he also sits on the Board of Directors. He is a member of the National Coordination Council of Agua para Tod@s, Agua para la Vida (“Water for all, Water for Life”) and a participant in the Society, Environment and Institutions (SUSMAI) graduate seminar at UNAM.

Founder and Director of the lncalli lxcahuicopa Center for Sustainability (Centli), which also includes agro-ecological and forestry centers, both located in Tlalmanalco, Mexico State, and co-founder of the Amecameca and La Compañía River Basins Commission, Moctezuma Barragán also has experience in implementing community development processes and in projects on the design and self-managed construction of social housing. He has overseen planning in areas such as ecological land-use planning, water resources and micro watersheds management, municipal development and comprehensive solid waste management.

His experience in teaching spans four decades. Founder of the Department of Socioeconomic Research at the Torreón School of Economics, in Coahuila, he has given over 140 courses in various academic institutions and advised a large number of professional and postgraduate dissertations. In addition, he has been a member of various academic commissions, organized courses and workshops, participated in the reviewing of undergraduate and MA curricula, and presented over two hundred papers and conferences in dozens of universities in Mexico, as well as in Europe, Canada, the United States and Latin America. The author of over 60 publications, he has also sat on multiple editorial boards.

Richard Morgan was appointed Executive Director of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation in 2019, after serving as a Commissioner of the (Canada-U.S.) International Joint Commission from 2014 to 2018. He has taken leadership roles for 35 years in international relations, government, business and management consulting in several sectors, ranging from natural resources to health sciences. Richard has a keen understanding of the North American landscape, government organizations and the business sector, and considerable experience in collaborating with stakeholders in the environmental and sustainable development area. Richard started his career in 1986 in the Office of the Prime Minister as Executive Assistant to Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and served in that role for several years and also as Special Advisor, Director of Planning and Operations. He later joined the corporate office of Bombardier as strategic planning advisor. He is a graduate in business administration from the University of Ottawa.

Holder of a PhD in Anthropology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), specializing in forestry governance (Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University) and sustainable development (LEAD Program, Colegio de México), Leticia Merino Pérez is a researcher and lecturer at UNAM’s Institute for Social Research and its Sustainability Sciences Postgraduate Program. For over 35 years, she has devoted herself to research on issues and public policies related to the use, management and governance of territories and natural resources in rural and indigenous communities. Since 2017, she has coordinated UNAM’s Society, Environment and Institutions University Seminar (SUSMAI) and the academic observatory of the same name, which brings together SUSMAI members and other associations from civil society and academe.

From 2013 to 2015, she was president of the International Association for the Study of the Commons, where she also sat as a council member from 2004 to 2015. A member of the UN’s Committee for Development Policy since 2016, Merino Pérez was a lead author in 2017-2019 of a chapter in the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). Since 2018, she has been a lead researcher with the interdisciplinary Earth System Governance Project.

Leticia Merino Pérez is the author or co-author of 8 books and over 70 articles and book chapters, published in Spanish and English, by national and international publishing houses.

Robert Manson is a tenured researcher at the Institute of Ecology, A.C., a federal research institute in Mexico focused on natural resource management and other environmental issues. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Washington & Lee University and both his masters and PhD in Ecology and Evolution at Rutgers University, working with researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. He started working in Mexico in 1999 with support from an NSF International Research Fellowship. His current research focuses on improving sustainability in the coffee sector in Mexico, the mapping, quantification and valuation of the ecosystem services of Mexico’s forests, and strengthening programs making payments for hydrological services (PHS) through a combination of scientific and community-based monitoring networks. He is the author of over 75 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and four books. He is a member of the merit-based National System of Investigators in Mexico (Level II).

Earthea Nance is committed to working with vulnerable communities at disproportionate risk of hurricanes, floods, oil spills, pollution, and lack of access to water and sanitation. She served as a public official after Hurricane Katrina, where she directed the office of disaster mitigation and planning for the City of New Orleans. She managed $60 million in recovery funds, created the city’s first approved hazard mitigation plan and sustainability plan, and also represented the city in disaster recovery discussions with FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the State of Louisiana. After Hurricane Harvey, she served on a team of flood experts known as the Greater Houston Flood Mitigation Consortium. She and her colleagues provided recommendations to elected officials and produced a definitive body of information on flood mitigation for the Houston region.

Her research is published in dozens of peer-reviewed journals, including recent articles in the journal Nature, the journal Atmosphere, and the Journal of Humanity and Society. She also wrote a scholarly book about the activist engineers in Brazil who expanded access to water and sanitation. Her PhD in civil and environmental engineering was earned at Stanford University, following bachelors and masters degrees in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California-Davis. She has been a registered professional civil engineer for 25 years and a certified floodplain manager for 12 years. She currently teaches at Texas Southern University, a historically Black university, following teaching positions at the University of New Orleans, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Virginia Tech.

Alexandra R. Harrington is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Global Governance and Emerging Law and Research Director of the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law. She has served as Fulbright Canada Special Foundation Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada, and also held the 2018–2019 Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Global Governance there. She holds a doctoral degree in law from the McGill University Faculty of Law.

Harrington is the author of International Organizations and the Law (2018), International Law and Global Governance: Treaty Regimes and Sustainable Development Goals Interpretation (2021) and the forthcoming Just Transitions and the Future of Law and Regulation (Palgrave Macmillan 2022). She serves as the Director of Studies for the International Law Association Colombian branch, and is a member of the International Law Association Committee on the Role of International Law in Sustainable Natural Resource Management for Development, of the Climate Law and Governance Initiative’s Scientific Committee, and of the Green Economics Institute’s Research Group. She also guest lectures globally on topics related to international law, environmental law, global governance, and sustainable development, and is an international advisor to various faculties, including the University of Silesia Faculty of Law.

She has served as a consultant for such entities as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, UNEP, and IDLO. Her nearly one hundred publications address a variety of fields relating to international law, including international organizations, governance issues, environmental law, legal issues relating to climate change, international child’s rights, natural resources regulation, international human rights law, international trade law, corporate social responsibility, and criminal law.

Tonio is an Indigenous ally of German and Egyptian ancestry. He is Senior Director of Environment, Lands & Water at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), and in this capacity has co-chaired several national committees, including the AFN/Canada Joint Committee on Climate Action (JCCA). He is also a board member of the Climate Reality Project Canada, and is a Principal Investigator for the Food, Environment, Health and Nutrition of First Nations Children and Youth (FEHNCY) study. He has a PhD from Simon Fraser University (2008) and teaches in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa.

Gladys has over 15 years of experience in legal, policy, and community-based work for environmental justice and civil rights. Having joined CEJA in 2017 as its first Executive Director, Gladys brings a deep connection to CEJA’s members and partners.

Gladys has extensive experience working on behalf of immigrant communities, including as staff attorney at the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund (MALDEF), where she litigated cases concerning anti-immigrant laws, racial discrimination, and the rights of low-income immigrant workers.

Most recently, Gladys worked as an attorney at Communities for a Better Environment, one of CEJA’s core members, on successful high stakes environmental justice matters including the shut down of Exide’s battery smelter that for decades polluted surrounding communities with dangerous levels of lead and arsenic, resulting in one of the most serious environmental catastrophes in California.

Gladys also helped lead the work of the Standing Together Against Neighborhood Drilling (STAND-LA) coalition alongside our partners at PSR-LA. Gladys brought an unprecedented environmental and civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Youth for Environmental Justice against the City of Los Angeles challenging the rubber-stamping of oil drilling projects in neighborhoods, resulting in the City’s issuance of a robust administrative guidance policy that provides environmental and anti-discrimination protections. Gladys was also a lead attorney representing CEJA in the fight to defeat the Puente Power Plant in Oxnard, a fourth dirty fossil fuel plant proposed in a disproportionately impacted community.