Are There Benefits to Integrating Corporate Health and Environmental Strategies? An Exploration of the Food/Agriculture and Textile Sectors

Lydia Olander is a program director at the Nicholas Institute for Energy Environment & Sustainability at Duke University and adjunct professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment. She works on improving evidence-based policy and accelerating implementation of climate resilience, nature-based solutions, natural capital accounting, and environmental markets. She leads the National Ecosystem Services Partnership and sits on Duke’s Climate Commitment action team. She recently spent two years with the Biden administration at the Council on Environmental Quality as Director of Nature based Resilience and before that spent five years on the Environmental Advisory Board for the US Army Corps of Engineers. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and widely published researcher. Prior to joining the Nicholas Institute, she spent a year as an AAAS Congressional Science and Technology Fellow working with Senator Joseph Lieberman on environmental and energy issues. She was a college scholar at Cornell University and earned her Master of Forest Science from Yale University and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Dr. Gallagher's research examines public policies to promote environmentally sustainable business practices and public/private partnerships for environmental policy implementation. She has critically examined the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) as an international environmental governance mechanism to promote business sustainability. Recent work in partnership with the UNGC focused on responsible business engagement in climate policy and implementation of an internal price for carbon. She is currently working with the UNGC on evaluating corporate leadership behaviors which would advance the Sustainable Development Goals. Dr. Gallagher is also a leading scholar of environmental leadership, serving as editor of SAGE's Handbook of Environmental Leadership, which created a framework for study in the field. She is collaborating with colleagues on an upcoming book, Critical Perspectives on Environmental Leadership.