Daniel Esty

Daniel Esty Speaker Biography

Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University and Leading Expert on Corporate Environmental Strategy and Sustainability

Dan Esty is the Hillhouse Professor at Yale University with primary appointments at Yale’s Environment and Law Schools and a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Management. He serves as director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and on the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, which he founded in 2007.

Publications

Professor Esty is the author or editor of ten books and dozens of articles on environmental protection, energy, and sustainability — and their connections to corporate strategy, competitiveness, trade, and economic success. His prizewinning volume, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, was recently named the top-selling “green business” book of the past decade.

Department of Energy and Environmental Protection

From 2011 to early 2014, Professor Esty served as Commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection where he earned a reputation for bringing fresh thinking to both energy and environmental policymaking. His policy innovations include Connecticut’s Green Bank and the “LEAN” restructuring of all of Connecticut’s environmental permitting programs to make the state’s regulatory framework lighter, faster, more efficient, and effective.

EPA

Prior to taking up his Yale Professorship in 1994, Professor Esty served in a variety of senior positions at the US Environmental Protection Agency (where he helped negotiate the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change). He also worked as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC.

Clients

As a globally recognized expert in corporate sustainability strategy, Professor Esty has helped dozens of companies in a wide range of industries to translate their environment and sustainability efforts into marketplace value. His clients have included: Alcoa, American Eagle, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Delhaize Group, Disney, Dow, FedEx, Hanesbrands, IBM, Ikea, Nokia, Unilever, Verizon, Waste Management, and Xerox.

Daniel Esty Speaking Topics

Corporate Sustainability Leadership

Based on his book, Green to Gold, written with Andrew Winston, business speaker Daniel Esty helps your organization understand why going green will actually help you feed your company's bottom line, while also being good to the environment and creating sustainable business practices. "This is an opportunity; markets that provide what society needs are going to profit."

Green is Good

Do you think that the recently renewed emphasis on green initiatives is somehow “bad” for business? As consumers are reevaluating the products and services they use and resources become scarcer, savvy companies should know about the opportunities available in an emerging marketplace. As Dan Esty, author of Green to Gold, makes clear, corporations can create value by building environmental thinking into their overall business strategies. Esty offers detailed case examples of how companies achieve both environmental and business success by establishing an “eco-advantage.”

The Greening of the Private Sector

In the past, it's been up to government to generate progress on environmental fronts. Esty believes the private sector is now better positioned to generate the technologies required to address environmental challenges. As economic factors-and consumers-drive a shift from regulation to market incentives, Esty shows how the private sector is increasingly meeting the challenge of producing solutions to environmental problems-and how these trends can benefit your company's success in the new marketplace.

Climate Change — From Breakdown to Breakthrough

As environmental policy heats up, so do the changes that come with it. With over 25 years experience in the environmental arena, Esty provides a perspective on the fast-changing world of environmental policy at the local, national and global scales. Audiences gain the insight of his years of experience advising Fortune 500 companies on environmental strategy. Esty shows companies how to respond to this changing, dynamic business environment.