Mining, Materials, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Cristian Parra is a Chilean-Australian economist at Malthus Global with 20 years of professional experience working with the extractive industry and its stakeholders globally. He has a long track record of senior advising in areas related to socioeconomic issues and progress of mining regions, social and economic mining performance, and impact assessment in developing and developed countries. Cristian has led and participated in projects in 15 countries in more than 50 mining regions across Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and Africa, working with importantmultinational resources companies, development institutions, donors, governments, NGOs, and community groups.

Brandon Lewis is a sustainable investment professional with over a decade of global experience working at the intersection of natural resources, finance, and policy. He has worked on four continents in fields as wide-ranging as mining, renewable energy, forestry, agriculture, project finance, microfinance, and policy. He holds a BSc in Geology, an MSc in Economic Geology, and an MBA in International Development. In 2015 at the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with UNDP and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, he co-authored Mapping Mining to the Sustainable Development Goals: An Atlas.

Saleem H. Ali holds the Blue and Gold Distinguished Professorship in Energy and the Environment at the University of Delaware, where he also directs the Gemstones and Sustainable Development Knowledge Hub, supported by the Tiffany & Co Foundation. He is also a Senior Fellow at Columbia University's Center on Sustainable Investment. Professor Ali has held the Chair in Sustainable Resources Development at the University of Queensland's Sustainable Minerals Institute in Brisbane, Australia (where he retains professorial affiliation).

His books include Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future, (Yale Univ. Press); Environmental Diplomacy (with Lawrence Susskind, Oxford Univ. Press) and Mining, the Environment and Indigenous Development Conflicts (Univ. of Arizona Press). Corporate and government experience includes employment in General Electric's Technical Leadership Program; a Baker Foundation Fellowship at Harvard Business School and a Research Internship at the UK House of Commons. He is a member of the United Nations International Resource Panel; was chosen as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011; and received an Emerging Explorer award from the National Geographic Society in 2010. He received his doctorate in Environmental Planning from MIT, a Master's degree in Environmental Studies from Yale University and Bachelor's degree in Chemistry from Tufts University (summa cum laude).