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I am thrilled to be joining GAIA to support its members in defining their environmental justice agenda on batteries, a new area of focus for the organization.
The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) is a global network of grassroots and national organizations from 92 countries around the world who are working together on waste and justice. I will be coordinating and ensuring cross-regional research alignment and strategy definition by GAIA members on electric vehicle battery waste, and supporting donor engagement.
This work with GAIA complements my existing work since 2018 with The 11th Hour Project, the grant-making arm of The Schmidt Family Foundation. In that role, I advise The 11th Hour Project’s human rights program on implementing its strategy in Guinea on asserting the human rights of communities impacted by industrial mining, as well as in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on access to energy and impacts of the world’s largest proposed hydropower dam project, Grand Inga.
My work now fittingly spans the full life cycle of addressing the human rights and environmental justice questions on materials to realize a just transition and climate justice: from the devastation wreaked on local communities by extraction of iron ore and bauxite in Guinea, to the unchecked production of toxic batteries with premature obsolescence that will make up the next wave of waste to be dumped in the global South, to the false promise of mega-hydro to deliver access to energy for all in DRC.