Professor Gail Whiteman is an expert on global risk arising from the systemic changes occurring in the natural environment, the founder of Arctic Basecamp and Professor of Sustainability at the University of Exeter’s Business School (UK).

Since 2012, she is the Professor-in-Residence at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.  She is a past member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Frontier Risk and was a scientific keynote speaker at WEF’s 2020 session at Davos “What’s at Stake: The Arctic” alongside panellists including Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin and Former US Vice President, Al Gore.  In 2023 she was also a panellist and speaker at the 2023 WEF session in Davos – Unpacking the Polar Crisis.

Professor Whiteman is an experienced moderator at events including Reuters Impact in 2022 and the World Economic Forum in Davos. She is actively involved in building science-based targets collective business action, including those for a future low-carbon economy. Her research utilises organisation theory on information flows to analyse how a range of actors (companies, civil society, and local communities) make sense of ecological risk, and how these actors transform and build resilience across scales given environmental pressures and social inequities.

She has over 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers, including in prestigious journals Nature, Nature Communication, and the Academy of Management Journal. Her PhD is from Queen’s University and her field work was conducted in the subarctic region of Canada.  She is regularly interviewed by the press and in 2023 launched a new Reuters series – Arctic Warning alongside Reuters Editor-at-Large, Axel Threlfall.  You can follow her @GenerationCO2