The future of resilient cities & property investing in an era of climate change and global pandemics

Regan Smith is the Director of Sustainability for Manulife Investment Management’s real estate equity business. In her role, Regan has overall accountability for implementing and managing the sustainability strategy across a global portfolio of real estate, totalling over 60 million square feet. She develops programs that not only meet but exceed the changing global market demand, policy landscape and investor expectations towards sustainability, and corporate ESG.

Since joining the company in 2018, Regan led the Sustainability & Energy team at the engineering consulting firm, WSP in Canada. In this role, she further developed her experience in development, building science and building restoration. She was one of the first consultants to provide green building and sustainability consulting in Canada, and holds professional accreditations in LEED, WELL, and RESET.

Derek oversees strategy, sustainability and risk for the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP) real estate investment portfolio. He leads strategic planning, risk management and full portfolio analysis and provides strategic insight and expertise on environmental, social and governance initiatives. Derek is an experienced leader, facilitator and communicator. He advocates for innovative and holistic process improvement and is passionate about the power of business for good.

Previously Derek was at Morguard where he founded the internal management consulting group and led strategic initiatives and ESG. Derek comes from the condominium sector and prior to that spent several years in the public service.

Gillian Marcelle, PhD is a senior leader in economic development and international business with a proven track record in attracting investment to emerging markets. She leads Resilience Capital Ventures LLC, a boutique capital advisory practice specialising in blended finance. Resilience has been successful in capital raising, including mobilizing domestic investors in Caribbean markets for a Fund issued by international investor MPC Renewable Energies GmbH. Dr Marcelle has designed and initiated a blended finance partnership with the Clinton Global Initiative, has served in staff roles with the International Finance Corporation, in capital markets at JP Morgan Chase and M&A with British Telecom. As part of her thought leadership practice, she is very active in the impact investment space, where her contributions and perspectives on diversity, inclusion, accountability and alignment with the SDGs are becoming influential. Her Sub-Saharan African activities include serving as a non-Executive Director of Tafari Capital Pty Ltd. and she previously was a tenured Associate Professor at Wits Business School, Johannesburg. She maintains deep and wide professional and academic networks in the US, Europe, across the African continent and the Caribbean bridging the worlds of finance and investment, international development and advocacy.

MS in Urban Planning. Female entrepreneur and researcher.
Co-founded and managing an urban data startup Habidatum, responsible for operations and analytical production.
Led the development of the first big urban data platform in Russia (as Urban Data Lead at Thomson Reuters, presented at Moscow Urban Forum 2013).
Reading lectures in Urban Data / Informatics in the leading Russian Institutions: ITMO, DVFU, HSE, RANEPA, Strelka Institute.
Publishing, speaking and exhibiting on the topics of data-driven urban planning, urban data analysis and visualization, smart cities.

Neil Pegram is the VP of Capital Markets ESG at Measurabl, the world’s most widely adopted ESG (environmental, social, governance) data management solution for commercial real estate. The platform helps over 45,000 commercial buildings (representing 9 billion square feet across 75 countries) bring their Sustainability/ESG data from building meters through to capital markets.

Neil is focused on engagements and product development for capital markets such as institutional real estate investors, and also providing products for asset managers particularly in Canada and USA.

Previously Neil was the Director of Americas at GRESB, a global industry-driven benchmarking organization committed to assessing ESG performance of real asset portfolios. 100+ institutional investors representing over USD 22 trillion in institutional capital use GRESB.

Neil has also been the Head of Sustainability at Morguard Investments, one of Canada’s largest fully integrated real estate companies ($22 million AUM) where he developed their GRI Standard sustainability reporting program and directed ESG initiatives. He has also worked in both private and public-sector consulting and research positions.

In 2014, Neil was honoured as one of Canada’s Clean50 for his "outstanding contribution to sustainable development and clean capitalism". He holds a B.Sc. from the University of Victoria, and a M.Sc. in Strategic Leadership and Sustainability from BTH University Sweden.