Anna Jonsson

Anna is a co-founder of New Weather Sweden. With more than twenty years in environmental policy and in the environmental movement, she has worked extensively with various environmental issues and in several roles. She also has broad experience of leading conversations and creative processes as a screenwriter, workshop leader and moderator.

Anna has her roots in the environmental movement and has been chairman of the Swedish Field Biologists and Friends of the Earth Sweden. In those roles, she worked to strengthen the voice of the environmental movement through political influence. From 2007, she worked at the Green Party' in the Swedish Parliament with a focus on issues such as traffic and the environment, as well as as head of the environment and foreign team.

From 2018 until early 2021 Anna has worked at the Ministry of the Environment as a political expert and at the Prime Minister's Committee on the Environment, Climate and Biodiversity. Anna has previously been an expert in the Environmental Objectives Council and the Environmental Protection Agency. The work in environmental policy alternates Anna with assignments in theater and music with the environmental cabaret group Sweet Dreams.

Gunnar Lind

Gunnar has broad expertise and strategic experience in many environmental issues, both from the environmental movement and politics.

With a background in strategic marketing and writing, he became involved in environmental issues in the early 1990s and started as a fundraiser at Greenpeace in 1993. Pretty quickly he started working with the core issues and over the years he has been an expert and campaign leader in energy, nuclear weapons, waste, chemicals, GMOs, forests and, not least – climate.

From the beginning of the 2000s until 2014, he was a central part of the Green Party's parliamentary office where he developed policy in the energy and climate area. Among other things, he was the initiator and architect of introducing a climate policy framework in Sweden.

Most recently, he comes from the staff of the Minister for the Environment and Climate, Isabella Lövin, where he worked as a political advisor until February 2021. Now he is taking his experience from there on as a co-founder of New Weather Sweden. Gunnar writes historical books about the archipelago when there is space.

NEW WEATHER INSTITUTE (Great britain)

Andrew Simms

Andrew Simms is an author, analyst and campaigner.

Andrew co-founded the New Weather Institute and coordinates the Rapid Transition Alliance. He is a research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex, a Fellow of nef (the New Economics Foundation) where he was also Policy Director for many years and established its Climate Change, Energy and Interdependence Programme, and has been a frequent contributor to the Guardian and BBC . He is also the assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility. He co-founded the Green New Deal group in 2007, the climate campaign onehundredmonths.org that ran until 2017, and devised Earth Overshoot Day.

A political economist and environmentalist, Andrew studied at the London School of Economics and has written widely on the political economy of both global and local economies, and sat on the board of the Transition Network. He coined the phenomenon of ‘Clone Town Britain’ and led nef’s work on the ‘Great Transition’. New Scientist magazine called him a ‘master at joined up progressive thinking.’

Bill McGuire

Bill McGuire is a leading academic authority on climate hazards, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, he is also a campaigner, broadcaster and popular science writer. 

Bill is a volcanologist by inclination and training. In 1996, he was a Senior Scientist at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory and in 2010 a member of the Science Advisory Group in Emergencies (SAGE) addressing the Icelandic volcanic ash problem. He was a member of the UK Government Natural Hazard Working Group established in January 2005, in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and a co-author of its report: The Role of Science in Natural Hazard Assessment. His later work focused on climate change and its impacts, particularly upon the solid Earth, and he was a contributor to the 2012 IPCC report on climate change and extreme events.

Lindsay Mackie

Lindsay Mackie was trained as a journalist in Scotland and joined The Guardian as a reporter.

She has worked with Nef, the new economics foundation, as a campaigns consultant contributing to programmes on local economies, banking reform and heading the campaign for a publicly owned  Post Office Bank.

Her main professional interest now is in opening up ways to combat neoliberalism and its accompanying marketisation of everything. In a varied working life which could be kindly called organic, she has also been Director of the Diana Princess of Wales Award for Young People and expanded and strengthened it so that it now has over 40,000 award holders.

She was a co- founder of FilmClub, now in 7,000 schools, and she is a Trustee of EnglishPen the writers organisation. She is currently a member of the Tower Hamlets Fairness Commission.

Sarah Woods

Sarah creates performances, films, events and campaigns in collaboration with communities, scientists, economists and specialists.

Her theatre work has been produced by the RSC, The Hampstead, Soho Theatre and the BBC, regional theatres and touring companies. Her first collaboration with the New Weather Institute before joining us was the short play, Neoliberalism: The Break-Up Tour, written and produced jointly with Andrew Simms, and commissioned by ArtsAdmin. Other recent productions includes: After Hiroshima (London Bubble); META (Cardboard Citizens/Wellcome Trust); The Roadless Trip (Artsadmin, UK tour), a performance piece about systemic change; Benefit (Cardboard Citizens, UK tour) looking at recent changes to the benefit system. Many of her plays are published by Oberon Books.

Sarah has written extensively for BBC Radio 4, most recently Borderland, imagining a possible post-Brexit UK, an adaptation of William Morris’ News From Nowhere; A Speck Of Dust about austerity and inequality; original drama-documentaries about climate change Getting To Zero and Getting To Four Degrees; and Watch Me looking at the neuroscience and lived experience of empathy. And, she has recently been commissioned to adapt Karl Marx’ Das Kapital for BBC Radio.

For Birmingham Opera, Sarah has written an original opera with the composer Giorgio Battistelli, and worked on The Co-operative Group’s Anti Tar Sands and Frack Free UK campaigns, the Fabian Society’s Food and Poverty Commission, and the Centre for Alternative Technology’s Zero Carbon: Making it Happen project. She is currently working on National Clean Air Day, and the Ashden Trust’s Visioning London project.

She ran the MPhil in Playwrighting at Birmingham University from 2002 to 2006 and currently teaches playwrighting and Art For Change at Manchester University. Sarah is Cardboard Citizens’ Narrative Artist and a Wales Green Hero.

David Boyle

David Boyle is a fellow at the New Economics Foundation and has been at the heart of the effort to develop co-production and introduce time banks to Britain as a critical element of public service reform.

He was recently the government’s independent reviewer on Barriers to Public Service Choice (2012-13). David is the author of a number of books about history, social change and the future. His book Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life (Flamingo, 2003) helped put the search for authenticity on the agenda as a social phenomenon. The Tyranny of Numbers (Flamingo, 2001) and The Sum of Our Discontent (Texere, 2001) predicted the backlash against the government’s target culture. Funny Money: In search of alternative cash (Flamingo, 1999) launched the time banks movement in the UK. His book Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes? was published by Fourth Estate. He also writes history books.

Leo Murray

Leo Murray co-founded Plane Stupid, where he played a central role in strategic planning and communication for three years from 2006.

Leo also designed and co-founded 10:10 Climate Action in 2009, where he is currently director of innovation. Leo is the brains behind the Frequent Flyer Levy, and presently Strategy Lead for the Rapid Transition Taskforce. He is just completing a 12 month period serving as a part time political advisor on the transition to a sustainable economy to Labour’s Shadow Minister for Sustainable Economics, Clive Lewis MP. Leo also created the Trump Baby blimp to protest the US President’s visits to the UK in 2018 and 2019, amongst other things.

Sarah Burns

Sarah Burns is a designer, maker and printer, printing mostly in her garage. Her prints are collaborations between people, place and pattern.

Sarah believes that patterns are deep and powerful and contain a resonance and imagination, which have the potential to re-imagine the world around us. Her work is about helping communities and neighbourhoods tap into their distinctive patterns and develop their pattern-making skills.

She has worked in schools, health centres and widely across the public sector, with patients, children and consumers to transform the services they use by mobilising their skills, talents, time and creativity. She set up the first time bank in a health centre, the famous and award-winning Rushey Green Time Bank, and co-founded the London Time Bank network. She was head of the co-production team at the New Economics Foundation from 2001 to 2006.