On March 7th, 2024, Harvard University students and alumni heard from Dr. Lea Borkenhagen, Senior Vice President of EDF+Business and Pamela Fletcher, former Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer of Delta Airlines on careers in corporate sustainability and climate action.

Dr. Lea Borkenhagen is the senior vice president of EDF+Business, directing EDF’s strategy to catalyze private sector action that accelerates the transition to net zero emissions, creates safer products, and feeds the world without warming the planet. Dr. Borkenhagen brings two decades of experience in driving positive environmental and social outcomes through business leadership by developing future-facing strategies with the top global food, fashion, retail, and tech companies. She served as Global Strategy and Innovation Advisor to the Earthshot Prize, crafting the strategy to find solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. Prior to that, Lea spent a decade at Nike, where she led a brand-only collaboration of global fashion, retail, and sportswear companies representing over $250B in revenue to deliver accelerated impacts on sustainability industry-wide. Lea headed Nike’s strategy to overturn a decades-old approach to labor and instead value it as a revenue driver, working from factory level to Board.

Before Nike, Lea led Oxfam GB’s global livelihoods work, enabling her team to co-found the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and the Better Cotton Initiative, to build globally relevant frameworks for understanding business impacts on poverty, and to create accelerator fund mechanisms to support businesses that improved wages for low-income populations.

Lea holds a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from the University of California at Berkeley on agriculture in Indonesia and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Cote d’Ivoire. Earlier in her career, Lea focused on biodiversity and forest conservation, contributing to the first WRI-IUCN-UNEP Global Biodiversity Strategy where she pioneered a focus on gender and was awarded by UNEP as a New Generation Leader. Her undergraduate degree from Harvard University in Biological Anthropology examined primate and forest ecology in Indonesia.

Pamela Fletcher is a seasoned executive with over three decades of experience across the automotive and transportation industries, with a proven track record of leading innovation, creating new, high-growth businesses, driving market expansion, and growing new revenue streams.

Currently, Fletcher serves on the Lumentum Board of Directors and on the Board of Advisors for the College of Engineering at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.

Previously, was Senior Vice President, Chief Sustainability Officer and Corporate Innovation at Delta Air Lines, Inc., where she led Delta’s Sustainability and Innovation organizations in service of the company’s net-zero future. Prior to Delta Air Lines, she enjoyed a fifteen-year career at General Motors, where she held senior leadership positions such as Vice President of Global Innovation and Vice President of Electric Vehicles, among other roles.

Fletcher is a well-known innovator in the transportation sector, having been named in Motor Trend’s 2018 and 2019 “Power List;” on Automotive News’s 2020 list of “100 Leading Women in the North American Auto Industry;” and on Crain’s 2021 list of “100 Most Influential Women.”

Fletcher holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Kettering University and a Master of Engineering degree from Wayne State University. She has also completed Executive Education programs at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Harvard Business School, and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.