For our third Emerald Green awards The Fifth Estate has chosen to honour five people who were key to our hugely successful seven part events program this year and who cast their influence well beyond to the broader industry.
These awards are an informal program that we do completely in house, from a personal and impressionistic perspective.
Meet the Emerald Green stars of 2025 in alphabetical order:
Maria Atkinson
Maria has now MC’d more of our events than we can count. What we love is the spark and excitement she brings to the sessions, challenging presenters and audience alike to question assumptions and to find positive solutions that go well beyond the discussion at hand.
Maria is an environmental scientist, consultant, a New South Wales Net Zero Commissioner, a venture partner at Nirman Ventures and the chair of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction. She’s got many years contributing to and advancing the sustainability industry and is most widely known as co-founder and chief executive of the Green Building Council of Australia. Prior to that, she had been an.
She also has an impressive lineup of organisations she has served as a non-executive director, including Bingo Industries, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, The Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, The Ethics Centre, Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Global Foundation. Other notable roles include commissioner to the Greater Sydney Commission and global head of sustainability at Lendlease.
Steve Ford
Steve has also contributed generously to our events with fearless observations that cut through the greenwash and challenge us all. He’s the former head of sustainability at GPT and has been well known as an industry authority on energy and decarbonisation, resilience, resource circularity and nature impact for more than 20 years.
Steve has made many big impacts on our work, including the observation about the importance of water neutrality when it comes to the environmental impact of construction. He most recently spoke at TFE’s Electro Retrofit Masterclass about the drivers that can speed up decarbonisation.
He’s recently shared some “postcards” from Berlin and Amsterdam on some of the learnings he’s picking up on sustainability and housing.
Ali Ingram
Ali was one of those people who hit the ground running. We didn’t know her before inviting her to present at an event early this year on the strong recommendation from an industry observer that she is a rising star. We heard this recently confirmed by another industry insider who heard her speak at a recent Melbourne event.
Ingram is the head of sustainability and capital markets for JLL Asia Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Ingram previously worked at Singaporean real estate developer CapitaLand for 12 years.
Ingram’s views at TFE’s Show Me the Green Money earlier this year had strong cut through on where the capital markets were heading. Among her observations were the rising importance of adjacency between energy infrastructure and industrial property, and defence assets grudgingly making their way into acceptable investments. She said that even if you can swap out words such as ESG, energy efficiency and even DEI, the programs will live on.
Matt Kean
Matt Kean was the star of our first event this year. He was appointed chair of the federal Climate Change Authority in 2024 for a five year term and is also director at climate investment firm Wollemi Capital. This year, he was also appointed an adjunct professor at UTS, a board member of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, and a fellow at the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand.
He was already known to many in NSW as the former member for Hornsby in the NSW Parliament and as state Treasurer and Energy Minister under Premier Dominic Perrottet. He had also been deputy leader of the NSW Liberal Party, the shadow health minister and held other ministerial seats in innovation and better regulation, treasury, energy and environment.
During his tenure, his proudest work was championing climate action and in 2020, delivering the Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap, a 20 year plan to spur private investment in renewable energy to reduce emissions and power bills for citizens.
Matt kicked off TFE’s first event in the Navigating Sustainability series, Green investment, politics and policies in a year of radical change – as he stood firm against his former party’s stance on nuclear energy despite bullying and threats that they would remove him from his role if they were to win the election. At the event, Kean advocated for signs of hope for “bipartisan consensus” on climate policies.
Alex Sear
Alex is another favourite presenter with our audience who brings the highly technical world of engineering to life with his peerless mix of energy and expertise. His role at ADP Consulting is as director and building revitalisation lead. Prior to that, he spent several years in London, undertaking an MBA at Imperial College London and then led the hydraulics and mechanical teams at Elevate and XCO2. He had also been a senior engineer and coordinator at Norman Disney and Young.
Among the projects he’s worked with is the Hemis Monastic School in the Himalayas, where he lived with monks to help with the building process. It was a complicated project where the electricity supply was unreliable, and wood burners were the primary source of heating. Drawings had to be translatable to people with little or no English.
At the Electro Retrofit Masterclass this year, he focused on myth-busting, such as breaking open the notion that buildings with poor sustainability profiles could not achieve a high NABERS rating. A Melbourne building with the worst “high performing” facades he’d ever seen could still operate at a 4.5 star NABERS rating, he said.