Sheridan to Welcome International Visionary on Sustainability

Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, an internationally-recognized leader on sustainable development, will make a special presentation at Sheridan on Monday, October 18.

For Immediate Release: October 14, 2010
Oakville, Ontario

Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, an internationally-recognized leader on sustainable development, will make a special presentation at Sheridan on Monday, October 18 from 2-3 pm in MacDonald-Heaslip Hall, located at Sheridan’s Oakville Campus at 1430 Trafalgar Road.

“We are very excited to welcome Dr. Robèrt to Sheridan,” said Dr. Mary Preece, Sheridan’s Senior Vice-President, Academic & Research. “Sheridan is launching our own sustainability initiative this fall, and we anticipate that Dr. Robert’s experience and expertise will be invaluable to us as we embark on this important journey.”

An internationally recognized thought leader on sustainable development, Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt will speak to the leadership role that innovative institutions like Sheridan can play in sustainable development. Dr. Robèrt is the founder of The Natural Step, a global network of non-governmental organizations that lead change toward environmental and social sustainability. A doctor and cancer scientist by training, Dr. Robèrt founded The Natural Step in 1989 to promote a unifying framework for social and ecological sustainability based on a scientific consensus. Dr. Robèrt has successfully nurtured what began as a grassroots effort in Sweden—a country recognized globally as a sustainability leader—into an international movement that has spread to 15 countries and engaged thousands of people in hundreds of organizations worldwide.

For the past 20 years, Dr. Robèrt has worked with well-known organizations such as IKEA, McDonald’s, NIKE, Scandic Hotels, and Electrolux to help them pioneer sustainable solutions and transform their organizations. Over 100 municipalities around the world are also using the approach that Dr. Robèrt created.

Besides being the founder of The Natural Step, Dr. Robèrt is also a Fellow of the World Business Academy, an advisory board member at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a Doctor of Public Service at the University of Portland, a professor of sustainability at the Blekinge Institute of Technology, and a member of the EU Roundtable on Sustainability. In 2004, Dr. Robèrt launched a Masters program in Sweden on strategic leadership toward sustainability, which graduates 75 international students each year. He currently serves as Chairman of the international research program Real Change, which recruits university, private, and public sector partners across the globe to apply The Natural Step Framework to key research issues. In 1999, Dr. Robèrt won the Green Cross Award for International Leadership and, in 2000, he won the Blue Planet Prize, often considered the ‘Nobel Prize’ for ecological sustainability. In 2006, he was included in the publication “100 Visionaries of the 20th Century,” and, in 2009, he was given the prestigious honour of being named an Ashoka Fellow.