Sheri Penner | Deloitte Canada
Sheri's passion for climate action grew from a personal improvement journey to find a better balance between work demands and her personal values.
"Realizing my pace of life was not sustainable or totally authentic to who I was, I began down a path of learning about myself. One of the questions I spent time exploring was, ‘What am I missing on the health side and the way I eat?’”
She became vegan for health reasons, a choice that was later reinforced by her concerns for animal welfare and the environment.
“I questioned the broader impact I should be having in the world beyond just getting ahead. I realized our food and lifestyles are part of a bigger system and that it was naive to think I could get the best of everything and consume all of this ‘stuff’ without having an impact. It highlighted the inequalities in society and the need for a fairer and healthier system for everyone, including animals and the environment.”
“The beauty of making the right choices is it's not a trade-off. We can eat better, live healthier lives, and we don't have to harm animals, and the environment doesn't suffer. It made me think, ‘Why aren't we all doing this?’”
“I questioned the broader impact I should be having in the world beyond just getting ahead. I realized our food and lifestyles are part of a bigger system and that it was naive to think I could get the best of everything and consume all of this ‘stuff’ without having an impact.”
— Sheri Penner
Three things keep Sheri motivated.
“I feel blessed to work in an organization supercharged by resources, encouragement, and priorities, giving me a platform like WorldClimate to do something meaningful. I have a front-row seat to influence real change.”
“The second thing is my colleagues in our Green Champion Network. They put their hands up vigorously to say, ‘I want to do something. I want to be part of whatever it takes.’ It's a level of energy and enthusiasm not everyone gets to work with.”
“The third one is people, but on a different level—our next generation. Listening to my daughter back from her school environmental group, the things they care about, and their mentality toward changing things. It gives me hope and amplifies a feeling of responsibility in me.”
“I find Margaret Klein Salamon—a climate activist and a climate psychologist—inspiring because she's trying to tackle the problem effectively and professionally.”
“Her idea is that psychology is at the root of many of the difficult changes we need to make to address climate change on both a personal level as consumers and citizens and on systemic levels such as food and energy systems.”
Sheri at High Falls, at the end of a long hike in one of many protected provincial parks near her cottage
WorldClimate is our internal sustainability office where we test everything our clients need to transition—from transforming data platforms to change management to expanding financial reporting. We call it Living Labs.
“We share our internal experiences and the advancements we are making, collaborating as peers in the market with other sustainability leaders.”
“Often, when we talk to clients about our climate services, we're not talking about our climate services. We're talking about, for example, their need to have a business strategy that incorporates energy transition. To do that could involve many different services such as financial modelling and building data sets. Our team wraps all those services together as a climate package to ensure they execute in a way that delivers the right outcomes.”
Sheri gives an example of WorldClimate in action, where her team's sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) initiative brought together internal transport and climate specialists with Canadian stakeholders from across the aviation ecosystem to solve the challenges facing the production and use of SAF.
“Deloitte flies a lot, so finding ways to reduce travel emissions is important. However, this wasn't a client-driven project. There was little appetite to drive SAF in the market, as it wasn't seen as a commercial opportunity. The WorldClimate team funded the project to test the opportunities and build a cohort of committed external stakeholders to take the work forward.”
“Often, when we talk to clients about our climate services, we're not talking about our climate services. We're talking about, for example, their need to have a business strategy that incorporates energy transition. To do that could involve many different services such as financial modelling and building data sets.”
— Sheri Penner
“How do we make it valuable to do the right thing when our current system only captures resource depletion as a valuable action?”
“Although Indigenous communities have been protecting forests and carbon capture environments for many years, historically, they haven't benefitted."
“For an equitable and inclusive transition, we have to understand the different impacts from a socioeconomic perspective of different demographics and then find ways to monetize the protection of the nature-positive and climate-positive impacts.”
“Now is the time because so many influential factors—social, regulatory, and innovation—are converging. Businesses that don't take advantage of these opportunities and don't make the transition part of their strategy will struggle. It’s just the right thing to do, on so many levels.”
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