GEMI Announces Mark Johnson as Chair of Board of Directors for 2021
Washington, DC. The Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI) has announced Mark Johnson, Senior Vice President and Director Private Sector Services, Gannett Fleming, Inc., as the Chair of GEMI’s Board of Directors for 2021.
“I am honored to serve as GEMI’s Chair in 2021” said Mark Johnson, Senior Vice President and Director Private Sector Services, Gannett Fleming, Inc. “GEMI provides a unique forum for corporate sustainability leaders to work together to develop actionable solutions to current and emerging business challenges. I am looking forward to working together with the leaders of this organization to advance the future of sustainable business, and help other businesses to prepare and lead their sustainability programs through an increasingly complex and disruptive future.“
In recent years, GEMI worked with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) to explore various external drivers of change that are likely to challenge companies as they strive to meet their business and sustainability goals over the next decade and beyond, culminating in the publication of the GEMI Future Forces That Will Disrupt Sustainable Business report in March 2020.
Over the next year, GEMI will be working to advance action on key insights gained through that process through a new Sustainable Disruption Project, while continuing its work to identify new solutions for recycling of food contaminated plastics through a Contaminated Plastics project, as well as its long-term mission of developing tools and resources to help companies improve the environment, their operations and add business value.
“Building on the learnings of last year’s Future Forces report, GEMI looks forward to working with Mark Johnson to bring corporate sustainability leaders from across sectors together to identify, understand and develop strategies to prepare for a wide range of possible future global disruptions that may challenge short to mid-term business sustainability goals, while creating new opportunities for leading organizations to position themselves for greater resiliency and success in the long-term,” said Steve Hellem, GEMI’s Executive Director.
Gannett Fleming has been a collaborator of GEMI since the early 2000s and joined GEMI as a full member in 2015. Mark Johnson was first elected to GEMI’s Board in 2016 as Communications Chair before being elevated to the role of Vice-Chair in 2018, and Chair in 2021.
As a partner to GEMI’s Water Sustainability Work Group in the 2000s, Mark Johnson and his team at Gannett Fleming lead the development of GEMI’s Collecting the Drops: A Water Sustainability Planner tool. The web-based tool is tailored for facility managers or owners and guides them through the process of assessing water use and impacts from their operations.
In 2016 GEMI again partnered with Mark’s team at Gannett Fleming on the development of an ISO 14001:2015 Self-Assessment Checklist, which has become one of the organization’s most highly downloaded tools in the years since. The Excel checklist is designed to improve facility managers’ understanding of the requirements and elements of the environmental management system outlined in the ISO 14001:2015 international standard.
“Mark and his team at Gannett Fleming have partnered with GEMI on a range of environmental sustainability projects over the past two decades, and we look forward to continuing to work together in advancing collaborative solutions to the range of new sustainability challenges and opportunities that will be impacting business over the years to come”, said Steve Hellem.
About GEMI
GEMI (www.gemi.org) is a global leader in developing insights, networking, and creating collaborative sustainability solutions for business. For over 25 years, GEMI has captured the vision and experience of global corporate environmental, health and safety (EHS) and sustainability leaders from diverse business sectors through the development of a wide range of publicly-available, solutions-based tools designed to help companies improve the environment, their operations and add business value. GEMI member companies and project supporters include organizations such as, ConocoPhillips, The Davey Tree Expert Company, Dell, ExxonMobil Chemical Company, FedEx Corp, FMI – The Food Industry Association, Gannett Fleming, JBS USA, Sealed Air Corporation, Smithfield Foods, Tyson Foods, Waste Management and Winpak.
