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Speaker

Linda Brown

Linda Brown is co-founder of Napa Climate NOW!, a local citizens advocacy organization working for smart climate solutions. She is also co-founder and Senior Vice President of SCS Global Services, an innovative global leader in third-party environmental, sustainability, and food quality certification, auditing, testing, and standards development. For more than three decades, Ms. Brown has supported the development and implementation of the company’s strategic initiatives and certification programs in sustainable agriculture, resource management (forests, fisheries, minerals), climate accounting, green building product assessment, and consumer product assessment.  In the climate arena, Linda has been working on a project with international implications to update the way we track carbon footprints and set climate policy.  In a nutshell, while our scientific understanding of the causes of climate change has evolved considerably over the past two decades, our climate accounting protocols are two decades out of date.  This means that carbon footprinting, carbon markets, climate NGOs, government climate policies and international climate treaties are all being shortchanged.  The next generation of climate accountability moves beyond carbon footprints to full climate impact profiles, based on the latest IPCC science. This approach integrates all climate pollutants – not just the Kyoto gases, but the short-lived climate pollutants and coolants as well – under one unified framework.  It sets the stage for a much better understanding of the scale of climate solutions needed, and offers a more realistic path toward climate stability, addressing near-term challenges as well as the long-term.  All of the climate organizations included in the fundraising conducted by the Climate Ride can immediately benefit from this updated climate accountability.