Renat Heuberger is the CEO and co-founder of South Pole, a global company specialising in sustainability solutions. He has been engaged as a social entrepreneur in the fields of sustainability, climate change and renewable energies since 1999. Prior to founding South Pole, Heuberger co-founded and acted as the CEO of the myclimate foundation, one of the world’s first players in the voluntary carbon market space. Supporting a global network of connected communities, Heuberger is considered an authority on climate change, carbon markets and sustainable development and is regularly interviewed in the media. Heuberger holds a Master's degree in Environmental Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and completed the Social Entrepreneur Programme, ISEP, at INSEAD and Executive Education at Harvard Kennedy School.
Professional life
After working for development organisation Swisscontact in Indonesia, Heuberger co-founded the World Student Community on Sustainable Development, as well as the platform for interdisciplinary projects Seed Sustainability. In 2002, he founded the Swiss myclimate foundation, a non-profit climate protection organisation that was inspired by a successful initiative to compensate the greenhouse emissions of flights of attendees at the annual meeting of the Alliance for Global Sustainability in Costa Rica. Heuberger acted as myclimate's CEO until 2006. Since founding myclimate in 2002, Heuberger has been an active climate policy and carbon markets advocate. He has also supported the UNFCCC process for over a decade, regularly chairing and presenting at official side events on topics such as "Sustainable CDM - Best Practice" at CoP 11/MoP 1 of the UNFCCC in Montreal and "What has carbon trade taught us about ecological markets?" at CoP 16/MoP 6 of the UNFCCC Cancun Summit. Heuberger presented his Shifting Fortunes insight at the 2013 WEF in Davos.
Awards and recognition
As a founding partner and CEO of , Heuberger coordinated the set-up of the company's global presence, winning the company the title of Best Project Developer in a peer-voted industry ranking by Environmental Finance between 2011-17 and enabling the first-ever issuance of Gold Standard certificates, the first issuance of -certified carbon credits in Southeast Asia and, with his colleague Christian Dannecker, the first Voluntary Carbon Standard forestry project in South America. Heuberger has also initiated with colleague Maximilian Horster the first climate credit card in Switzerland and the first carbon screener application on the Bloomberg Terminal that allows investors and asset managers to calculate the carbon footprint of every investable company around the world. The investment carbon footprinting business was successfully incubated and later sold to a large financial industry player, ISS, in 2017. Heuberger has been central in helping South Pole grow into a thriving organisation of over 350 employees, with the vision of mobilising finance at scale to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement to combat climate change. South Pole has become a well-known advisor to governments, businesses and capital markets on climate policy, sustainable supply chains and climate risks and opportunities.
Positions of trust
Heuberger was elected Swiss Social Entrepreneur 2011 by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation, along with Christoph Sutter, and received the sustainability award in 2013 by the Zurich Cantonal Bank. In 2014, Heuberger was elected as Member of the Global Agenda Council on Climate Change of the World Economic Forum. Heuberger currently serves as a board member of , Europe's largest public-private innovation partnership on climate change and is a member of the Innovation Council of , the Swiss Innovation Agency. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the , a platform for social entrepreneurship, and a member of the of the World Economic Forum.
