David Kennedy, who is currently a partner at EY, will become SBTi’s new CEO, following a six-month hiatus in which Sue Jenny Her, SBTi’s former chief legal officer, has served as interim CEO.
The previous CEO, Dr Luiz Amaral, resigned in July last year amid an internal row over the merit of carbon offsets, though he said he resigned for “personal reasons”.
In April, the board announced that it was considering accepting carbon offsets to mitigate Scope 3 emissions, but the proposal met with a fierce backlash by some SBTi staff, who called for Amaral’s resignation.
They warned that the inclusion of carbon offsets would allow major corporations to greenwash carbon footprints without really reducing their emissions.
Amaral’s response was to suggest that companies don’t have control over certain scope 3 emissions and therefore could not eliminate them without offsets.
Kennedy has led work on net-zero strategy and planning for international and national businesses across banking, food, infrastructure and manufacturing.
He was previously Director General of Food, Biosecurity and Trade at the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), where he led on food strategy, including net-zero and nature, food security, and farming reform.
David was also the founding Chief Executive of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC). Under his leadership, the CCC designed sector pathways, carbon budgets, targets, metrics, milestones, and key policies for the nation’s net-zero transition.
David held key roles at the World Bank and EBRD early in his career. He has a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics.
After the SBTi row: do carbon credits have a future in institutional portfolio?
