Alan Knight

Alan has nearly 20 years’ experience of working with global and national companies and governments on sustainability. Alan is a freelance advisor to business and government. He advises the Virgin Group on sustainable development and directs the Virgin Earth Challenge, an initiative to develop technology to recycle CO₂ direct from the air into commercially viable products. He chairs the UK Task Force on Peat which is coordinating the phase-out of peat in UK gardening and food production and is a panelist on the UK Independent Panel on Forestry.

He has worked with companies as diverse as B&Q, Kingfisher, SABMiller, Coca Cola, Axa Insurance, Body Shop, the Alberta Oil Sands Industry and has served on several Government advisory groups.

For nine years he was a commissioner with the Sustainable Development Commission. He helped to create the Forest Stewardship Council and introduced the concept of “choice editing” into the product policy debate.  He frequently lectures on sustainable lifestyles and product centric corporate sustainability in Europe, the Americas, Australasia and Asia.

He is a visiting professor at the Exeter University Business School and a Senior Associate of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership.

He was awarded the OBE in June 1998 and in 2005 the US-based Rainforest Alliance presented him with a lifelong award for his contribution towards finding solutions to forest loss by the timber trade.