Roland Clift

Roland is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia (Canada) and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Surrey (UK), where he was founding Director of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability.

Professor Clift is a chemical engineer by profession, with degrees from Cambridge and McGill Universities. After more than two decades working in particle technology, he turned to environmental issues and founded the Centre for Environmental Strategy (now the Centre for Environment and Sustainability) at the University of Surrey in 1992. His personal research interests are in system approaches, including industrial ecology and life cycle assessment. He is a past President of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. He now lives in British Columbia.

Roland has served on various public bodies, including the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and the Science Advisory Committee of the UK Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He was a founding member of the UK Ecolabelling Board and a member of the Groupe des Sages, set up to advise the European Commission on the application of LCA to ecolabelling. He has acted as advisor on environmental policy to a number of private and public organisations. He has received various awards including the Sir Frank Whittle Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2003); the P.V.Danckwerts Memorial Lecture award of the IChemE, AIChE and European Federation of Chemical Engineering (2010); and the George E. Davis Medal of the IChemE (2017).

His next book – “Living well on a finite planet: A multidimensional approach to sustainability” by Roland Clift, George Martin, Simon Mair and Rosalind Malcolm – is slated for publication by Springer in 2024.