Biography
Tzeporah Berman is the International Program Director at Stand.earth and the Chair of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. She was co-director of Greenpeace International’s Climate and Energy Program.
In 2016, Tzeporah was appointed by the Alberta Government to co-chair the Oil Sands Advisory Working Group, tasked with making recommendations to implement climate change and cumulative impact policies, and was listed as one of the 35 most influential women in British Columbia by BC Business Magazine. In 2015, she was awarded the YWCA Women of Distinction Award in British Columbia, and in 2013, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of British Columbia.
Tzeporah found her calling almost accidentally—at a highly controversial logging blockade amid the ancient rainforests of Canada in the early 1990s, where she was arrested along with hundreds of other forest activists. That did not stop her. Over the past 30 years, she has built a long record of leading and winning major environmental campaigns and negotiating significant policy victories.
Strategic, bold, ambitious, a force to be reckoned with. These are just a few ways to describe Tzeporah that have helped her get real-world results and find opportunities to negotiate lasting victories for the environment.
Tzeporah was one of the creators and lead negotiators of the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement and the Canadian Boreal Forest Initiative, whose work has contributed to the protection of over forty million hectares of old-growth forests. She also co-founded ForestEthics, a group that persuaded major companies that relied on old-growth timber to move toward sustainable practices. It later became STAND.earth.
She is also the author of This Crazy Time: Living Our Environmental Challenge.
Breakthrough Program
Tzeporah was selected for the Climate Breakthrough Award program in 2019.
For a long time, governments has been designing policy only to reduce demand for fossil fuels yet production continues and locked in new emissions. Tzeporah wants to build a campaign—creatively inspired by past global treaties that deal with global threats such as nuclear—and proposes a new treaty requiring governments to commit to stopping fossil fuel expansion. At the same time, the campaign will seek progressive corporate commitments to match their investment and commercial operations with firms and regions committed to no further fossil fuel expansion.
Such a treaty could completely overhaul the world’s energy sector if governments around the world came to endorse it.
In a short time since launch, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative has, according to Tzeporah, “changed the global conversation on climate policy and agreements, forcing decision makers and the UNFCCC process to address the need for a fossil fuel phaseout, and strengthening the global movement by unifying diverse campaigns around a clear ask that is commensurate with the problem.”
With Climate Breakthrough’s support, Tzeporah has also been able to launch other bold climate initiatives:
- A global registry of fossil fuel reserves and production is the first transparent database on fossil fuel production and reserves that shows carbon equivalents and is free online. It is now housed at Carbon Tracker, and they are in negotiations with UNEP to take it over.
- SAFE Cities program at Stand.earth, which now works with hundreds of cities across North America to help them put policies in place to reduce fossil fuel production and infrastructure.