Sustaining the Future | Women Leading Through Crisis

Against All Odds: Women Sustainability Leaders Navigate Crisis and Keep Going.

When the world feels like it's unravelling, how do you hold onto hope and keep building a sustainable future?

In 2025, women sustainability leaders aren't just fighting climate change, they're doing it while nearly one in four countries experiences a backlash against women's rights, and 612 million women and girls live within 50 kilometers of active conflicts. Traditional funding streams are drying up, international cooperation is fracturing, and political priorities are shifting daily. Yet somehow, they keep going.

This panel brings together four extraordinary leaders from corporate and NGO sectors who refuse to let geopolitical chaos derail their missions. These aren't theoretical discussions about resilience, these are the real stories of leaders who've had to reinvent their strategies, renegotiate partnerships, and find new pathways forward when their original plans became impossible.

On the 10th anniversary of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science and 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration, we're witnessing something unprecedented: women are leading sustainability efforts not despite the chaos, but because of their unique ability to adapt, innovate, and persist when systems collapse.

Executive women voices are often missing from conversations about how to actually navigate crisis. This panel fills that gap with unfiltered insights from leaders who are writing the playbook in real-time.

The Panellists

Flore Andersen

Co-founder, Slo Redefining the role of business itself. While most companies tweak CSR strategies, Flore is building alternative economic models that challenge growth-at-all-costs orthodoxy. What does it actually take to build a "slow" business in a fast-crisis environment?

Rhea Suri

Senior Account Manager, EnhesaTurning regulatory chaos into competitive advantage. As ESG reporting requirements multiply globally and compliance landscapes fragment, Rhea helps multinationals navigate mandatory environmental and social governance requirements across jurisdictions. How do you build resilient compliance strategies when the rules keep changing?

Annlore Defossez

Sustainability & Inclusion Transformation Leader2024 Sustainability Pioneer Finalist | 2025 Inclusive Tech Champion Making sustainability operational, not aspirational. Moving beyond buzzwords to embed sustainability and inclusion into organizational culture and business operations. What transformation tactics actually stick when budgets tighten and executive attention wavers?

Oceane Toukam

Human Rights Lawyer | Anti-Racism Trainer & Speaker ELSA Public Speaking Award Winner.

Practicing law where institutions prefer not to look. While human rights discourse stays comfortably abstract, Oceane works at the ground level—refugee rights, transitional justice, anti-racism training that confronts colonial legacies head-on. How do you build decolonial, intersectional justice when legal systems were designed to do the opposite?

Facilitated by Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik

CEO, Trianon Scientific Communication | Board Member & Policy Advisor, Brussels | TEDx Speaker

Audrey-Flore has spent her career in the uncomfortable space between scientific truth and business reality. With a PhD in Physical & Analytical Chemistry from Sorbonne University in Paris (FRA), she's built her reputation turning ESG from cost centre to profit driver in carbon-intensive industries, which means she knows exactly how the sausage gets made, and she's not here to let anyone hide behind corporate jargon or aspirational language. Expect a conversation that's as analytically rigorous as it is honest about the messy realities of sustainability leadership in 2025-2026.

Join us for an honest conversation about what it really takes to keep going when the world seems determined to make you stop. No platitudes. No inspiration theatre. Just the real decisions, trade-offs, and strategic bets leaders are making right now.