Green House Advisory Group

For media interviews please contact us at info@greenhousethinktank.org

Victor Anderson was a Green member of the London Assembly from 2000 to 2003. He previously worked as a researcher for Cynog Dafis, joint Green-Plaid Cymru MP for Ceredigion. He is also a published academic, writing for the New Economics Foundation and publishing Alternative Economic Indicators, a book which challenged the use of GDP as the central measure of economic activity.

John Barry is Professor of Green Political Economy at Queens University Belfast. His latest book is The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World (2012, Oxford University Press) - He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled ‘The Story of Unsustainable Growth: Understanding Economic Growth as Ideology, Myth and Religion’ (see here for an introductory article). From 2003-09 he was co-leader of the Green Party in Northern Ireland and from 2011 to 2018 was a Green Party councillor on Ards and North Down Borough Council.

Natalie Bennett, is a British politician and journalist who served as Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales from 2012 to 2016 and serves in the House of Lords as a green peer. Born in Australia, she worked as a journalist in the UK, Thailand and Australia. She writes extensively on topics as varied as agriculture and land use, health and education, feminism, refugees and economics. She writes for publications including the Independent, Politics Home, The Ecologist, Left Foot Forward and Yorkshire Bylines.

Anne Chapman has a background in environmental science and philosophy.  Her publications include Democratizing Technology: Risk, Responsibility and the Regulation of Chemicals (Earthscan, 2007) and a number of academic papers.  She was a member of Green House core group between 2011 and 2021 and was the author of reports on Greens in Science, Tackling our Housing Crisis, Community Energy in the UK and A Just Transition in Agriculture, as well as contributing a Chapter, Dealing with Extreme Weather, to the Green House book, Facing up to Climate Reality and writing Green House Gases and Green Reads.  She lives in Lancaster where she is a director of a renewable energy co-operative, a trustee of several charities, and is a community shares practitioner.

Andrew Cunningham is Professor of Wildlife Epidemiology and Deputy Head of Science at the Zoological Society of London. He has conducted research on disease threats to biodiversity for over 35 years. He has been awarded a CSIRO medal and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for his work on wildlife disease, which has included understanding disease ecology and the mitigation of pathogen spillover from wildlife to people.  He has been an advisor on wildlife health and One Health to the UK government, the G7, The World Health Organisation/Europe and to the UN Quadripartite (WHO, WOAH, FAO & UNEP).

Ray Cunningham is a freelance writer, speaker, translator and consultant on British-German knowledge exchange, mainly in the area of sustainability. He previously worked for the Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society as Projects Director, Deputy Director (in Berlin) and Director. Before that he taught in the university system in both Britain and Germany and worked in academic publishing. He is joint Founder and Convenor of the British-German Environment Forum. Ray has formerly been a Convenor, Director and Chair of Green House Think Tank.

Maya de Souza works in environmental policy in government, currently on circular economy policy. She has also worked with the business community in Hong Kong on setting under 2 degree C carbon reduction targets and transitioning to commercial electric vehicles. Maya was a councillor in Camden for 8 years where she pursued innovative ideas such as a community bond to fund local energy schemes.

Ed Gillespie is a keynote speaker, writer, communications specialist, serial entrepreneur and futurist. He is the author of ‘Only Planet – a flight-free adventure around the world’ a book about his circumnavigation of the globe without getting on a plane. Ed is a facilitator with the Forward Institute for responsible leadership, a Director of Greenpeace UK, a Trustee of Energy Revolution and co-founder of Futerra.

George Graham is a specialist in conflict, human rights, humanitarian response and inclusive international development. He is based in London, where he is chief executive of Humanity & Inclusion UK. He has a Masters’ degree in Violence, Conflict and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies and a BA in English from Oxford University.

Oliver Greenfield ​is convenor of the Green Economy Coalition​, which brings together over 60 organisations, from NGOs to businesses, research and international bodies who are united by a vision of prosperity for all within the limits of the planet. Prior to this, Oliver led WWF UK’s Sustainable Business and Economics work, where he pioneered systemic stakeholder change programmes. He has degrees in engineering, business and economics.

Peter Newell is a specialist in the politics and political economy of environment and development. For more than 25 years he has conducted research, consultancy and advisory work on issues ranging from climate change and energy transitions to agricultural biotechnology, corporate accountability and trade policy, working in a number of countries including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico and South Africa. Besides working for academic institutions including the universities of Sussex, Oxford, Warwick and East Anglia, and FLACSO Argentina, he has undertaken commissioned research and policy work for the governments of the UK, India, Ireland, Sweden and Finland and for international organisations such as UNDP, GEF, UNCTAD, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. He has worked for NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Climate Network Europe and together with groups such as Carbon Market Watch, Stand Earth, Practical Action, Transparency International, Care, Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, and the International Council on Human Rights Policy. He sat on the board of directors of Greenpeace UK.

Allyson Pollock is professor of public health at Newcastle University. She is an academic, public health doctor, and leading authority on Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and the implications of market mechanisms and privatisation of health and social care services. She is the author of NHS plc and co-author of The New NHS: A Guide. 

Jonathon Porritt is an English environmentalist and writer. He co-founded Forum for the Future in 1996, and his latest book, Hope in Hell, was published in 2020.

Rupert Read is co-director of the Climate Majority Project and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (UEA).He is the author of several books focusing on the climate and ecological crisis, including This Civilisation is Finished, Parents for a Future, Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Do you want to know the truth? The surprising rewards of climate honesty. His most recent book, Transformative Adaptation - Another world is still just possible, is co-edited with Morgan Phillips and Manda Scott. Described by Claire Perry O-Neill (former Conservative Climate Change Minister) as "one of the world's leading climate activists" and by former leader of The Green Party, Caroline Lucas, as "a go-to thought-leader", he is a determined and responsible campaigner for a better country and a better world. His advocacy-work has been described by award-winning journalist and best-selling author Naomi Klein as "absolutely amazing". 

Pritam Singh is Professor Emeritus at Oxford Brookes Business School and until recently a Visiting Scholar including at Wolfson College, Oxford as well as universities in Brazil, India & Russia. He has published four single authored books including: Federalism, Nationalism and Development: India and the Punjab Economy. He is on the editorial board of several journals including Capitalism Nature Socialism as well as having coedited another three books. On an invitation from Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), India’s most reputed academic journal, he guest editor its Special Punjab Issue in January 2017. He has won awards from World Association of Political Economy and University of California (Riverside).

Geoff Tansey curates the online Food Systems Academy, chaired the independent Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty in 2014-15, was a member of The Food Ethics Council from 2000-21 and holds a number of honorary positions in several universities. He became a trustee of the Quaker Peace Studies Trust in 2022. His books include The future control of food co-edited with Tasmin Tajotte and the prize-winning The Food System: a guide with Tony Worsley. His co-edited book 'A World Divided - Militarism and Development after the Cold War' from 1994 was republished in 2021. In June 2005, he received one of six Joseph Rowntree 'Visionaries for a Just and Peaceful World' Awards and, in 2008, he won the Derek Cooper Award for best food campaigner/educator, at the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards. The Future Control of Food was the joint winner of the Derek Cooper Award for Campaigning and Investigative Food Writing, in the Guild of Food Writers Awards in 2009.

Find out about the Green House Core Group.