Establishing competency in sustainable procurement in the age of ESG reporting

Author's Biography

Catherine Sheehy is the global lead for sustainability partnerships at UL, where she helps corporate leaders implement sustainability related programmes and greener product initiatives and helps steward UL collaborative work with external partners to advance evidence-based sustainability and circularity solutions. She also serves as a member of the UL Corporate Sustainability Council, charged with stewarding UL’s corporate sustainability initiatives. Prior to UL, Catherine was a manager with Accenture, where she led organisation design and change enablement teams and helped co-found Accenture’s internal volunteer eco-team network. Catherine’s other work experience includes work at the Human Rights Campaign advancing workplace LGBTQ+ equality and the then Investor Responsibility Research Center as director of corporate benchmarking services, where she provided social and environmental screening data, tools and support to institutional investors, companies and academic institutions. Catherine has served as president of the Net Impact Professional Chapter in Washington DC and served on the board of DC-based Sustainable Business Network of Washington (SB NOW). Catherine holds a BA from the University of Notre Dame, an MBA from the R. H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and is a certified Project Management Professional.

Josh Jacobs serves as Director of Sustainability for WAP Sustainability. In this role he helps develop and track the environmental rating systems, standards, codes and purchasing programmes that are being utilised throughout the world. As a LEED AP+ BD&C, Josh has served on over 30 sustainably focused committees, including but not limited to ASHRAE 189.1, LEED Steering Committee, USGBC’s Pilot Credit Committee, and served on the Water/IEQ work group that developed the first public draft of the integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC). He is a recurring guest lecturer at multiple universities and has spoken on sustainable building practices and purchasing on five continents. He works with organisations’ investor relations and sustainability teams to understand sustainable financial reporting tools such as SASB, GRI and TCFD. Josh served as chairman of the US Mirror Committee for ISO 20400 Sustainable Procurement, the 2015 NAHB Material/IEQ Working Group, vice chair for USGBC’s Pilot Credit Committee and currently serves a USGBC’s LEED Steering Committee Chair and as vice chair of ASHRAE 189.1.